Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [151]
Morse’s genteel replies made subscribers to his lines uneasy. The director of one company told him their concerns: “Many of our stockholders … begin to think you cannot protect our interest in your patent. They say you let O’Reily [sic] go on with impunity.” Although prodded by many others to take legal action, Morse considered O’Reilly’s course self-destructive. And he believed in bearing abuse with Christian meekness, leaving chastisement to God. Indeed his brother Richard suggested that God perhaps had made him eminent so that he might bear his cross before the public, affording “an illustrious exhibition of the christian character.”
By early spring, however, Morse had exhausted his humility. “It is high time these infringers should be brought up to the Bull ring,” he admitted, “and the sooner a case is decided in the courts the better.” Soon after O’Reilly opened the Louisville-Nashville section of his New Orleans line, Kendall sued him for infringing Morse’s patent. O’Reilly replied in a fiery pamphlet entitled “Letter of HENRY O’RIELLY [sic] to Professor MORSE.” Announcing that by early summer his lines would be in operation over four thousand miles from the Canada frontier to the Gulf of Mexico, he said he welcomed, indeed invited, indeed compelled Morse to sue him. He addressed Morse as a greedy hypocrite who bemoaned the “suffering poverty of genius” while teaming up with Smith and Kendall to extort money from him, “to blackmail me into the allowance of DOUBLE PRICE BEYOND WHAT YOUR CONTRACT REQUIRED FROM ME.” In defense this time of the Columbian telegraph, he charged that Morse had twice been denied a British patent “for want of originality” and challenged him to find a single rational American citizen “who believes that your Patent includes the lightning of Heaven.” He therefore welcomed a judicial inquiry. “The facts … will prove whether you or I most thoroughly deserve the ‘piratical’ reputation of plundering other men.”
For weeks Morse scarcely found time to sleep and eat as he prepared exhaustively for the trial, to be held in Frankfort, the state capital of Kentucky.“All my time has been occupied in defense,” he told Sidney, “in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would you have believed it ten years ago that a question could be raised on that subject?” He tried to document as fully as possible all of his early work on the telegraph. He obtained affidavits from the Captain and some passengers on the Sully. Through an ad in the Observer he turned up the physician who had treated the finger he burned with molten lead when casting type for his primitive port-rule. He gathered decade-old newspaper items and notes for experiments, facts and dates about his demonstrations at the Speedwell Iron Works, accounts from painting students and daguerreotype customers who had seen his in-progress apparatus at the University. Kendall spurred him to “push the adversary to the wall” and tried to cheer him up: “The troubles you encounter are but the tax a man has to pay for wealth and fame.”
Morse attended all fifteen days of the trial, which opened in Frankfort on August 24. A district judge presided, the Honorable Thomas B. Monroe, who took several hours delivering his opening statement. Three lawyers represented each side, collectively an impressive group of three former circuit judges, two professors of law, and one U.S. district attorney. More than a week was consumed in reading depositions and examining various telegraphs. The depositions on Morse’s behalf included two by current chief examiners in the U.S. Patent Office: Charles Page, who had served him as a consultant; and Leonard Gale, his colleague and collaborator at New York University in 1836–37, and formerly a patentee, although Morse had recently bought