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Greatly though he had once admired Morse, O’Reilly now craved revenge against him—“that cypher Morse,” as he said, with his “crocodile tears & lamentations.” Trying to wipe out the public’s image of Morse as The Lightning Man, he announced a competition for the best essay on the “Progress of Electric Discovery, with reference to the Telegraphic system.” He promised a $300 prize to the writer who most clearly proved that neither Morse nor any other single person could be said to have invented the electromagnetic telegraph. He also revived the Sully squabble, enlisting Morse’s old nemesis, Dr. Charles Jackson: “you are said to have been present when Professor Morse claims to have invented the ‘first practicable Electric telegraph’ … I invoke your aid, in the name of truth and justice, to rebuke charlatanism grown rampant.”

At the moment Jackson was caught up in a violent dispute with the medical profession. In October 1846 a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital had performed the first-ever operation on a patient anesthetized by ether. The surgeon had been persuaded to try the procedure by a former pupil of Jackson’s, a Boston dentist named William T. G. Morton. Jackson stepped forward to claim that he himself had first conceived anesthesia, and to demand one-fourth of the profits from licensing the invention.

Embroiled as he was in what would be a lifelong battle, Jackson lent himself to O’Reilly’s vendetta. “Those who know Mr. Morse,” he said, “are aware of the fact, that he had no knowledge of electromagnetism previous to his voyage in company with me in the packet ship Sully.” Pseudonymous articles appeared in the press, recounting and supporting Jackson’s version of The Sully Story. In a Detroit newspaper, “Horicon” declared: “It was on this passage that he explained and illustrated to Mr. Morse the principles of the Magnetic Telegraph.” “Morion”—a.k.a. Henry O’Reilly—complained in Greeley’s Tribune that “our learned countrymen, Drs. Henry and Jackson, are deprived of the honor and credit justly their due.”

Morse had no appetite for renewing his war with Jackson: “The most charitable construction of the Dr.’s conduct is to attribute it to a monomania induced by excessive vanity.” Feeling he must protect his reputation, however, he investigated Jackson’s claims to the discovery of Letheon (as the anesthetic was called). He also wrote to several Bostonians asking whether, years before, Jackson had ever shown them a model or drawing of an electrical telegraph. He particularly wished to disprove Jackson’s charge that he had known nothing about electromagnetism before meeting his adversary aboard the Sully. In fact, six years earlier he had attended lectures on the subject at the New York Athenaeum. The lecturer, Professor James Freeman Dana, had died. But Morse located the very magnet Dana had used for his demonstrations. This magnet of 1826 had stayed in his mind, and in its shape and wiring was identical with the magnet he had drawn in his notebook on the Sully in 1832. The comparison proved that he had had a general knowledge of electromagnetism long before meeting Jackson: “The first application of the electro magnet to Telegraphic purposes was by one S.F.B. Morse and no mistake.”

O’Reilly launched his most intense attack where he thought Morse was most vulnerable and had most to lose—the legality of the patent. “We have now the ‘bull by the horns.’ Let him roar!” He and his associates challenged the patent on every conceivable ground, among them the refusal of the British Attorney General, Sir John Campbell, to grant Morse an English patent. “His failure to secure a Patent … was ascribed to national prejudice,” O’Reilly said, “but this falsehood is exploded by the fact that Great Britain readily granted to Professor House, who is a Yankee, a Patent for his American Letter-Printing Telegraph.” He also seized on a technicality in Morse’s patent application. Morse had signed the document on April 7, 1838. But O’Reilly found that the date when the Committee on Commerce