Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [159]
That may or may not have been so. Most standard histories of photography dismiss Hill’s claim to have produced colored images. On the other hand, although many hillotypes survive they have yet to be scientifically analyzed. Justifiably or not, Morse championed Hill in a published letter to the Washington National Intelligencer, proud that in the history of the new art, America could take a place beside France. “The magnificence of this discovery,” he wrote, “is as remarkable as the original discovery of photography by Daguerre.”
A second, more complex cycle of lawsuits disturbed Morse’s pleasure in his new marriage and the peace of Locust Grove, ending late in 1853 at the United States Supreme Court. Many important inventions of the time were repeatedly litigated: Cyrus McCormick’s harvester nine times, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin fourteen times—Morse’s telegraph, ultimately, fifteen times. As an associate of Ezra Cornell’s remarked, “When the Angel proclaimed ‘peace on earth & good will to men,’ there was no telegraph.” Standing to gain by the most efficient development of the telegraph at the cheapest rates, newspapers and magazines covered Morse’s intricate hearings and trials in detail, as a cause célèbre: “THE GREAT TELEGRAPH CASE.”
Morse’s new legal troubles commenced with O’Reilly. O’Reilly had run himself ragged getting up dozens of handbills and a vast correspondence—on one day nineteen letters, filling forty-eight pages. He was almost broke, too, behind in his rent and unable to pay his grocer’s bills. Heavy legal costs drove him to sell a house and forty-acre tract overlooking Long Island Sound, which he had purchased as the possible site of a “Great Hotel” for “the fashionable world.”
Burdened or not, the “Napoleon of the Telegraph” had no intention of allowing Morse’s mere patent to obstruct his conquest of North America: “Every wrong and outrage strengthens my resolution to accomplish all and more than I ever promised.” Much more. Along his announced line to Oregon and California he proposed erecting stockades twenty to thirty miles apart, manned by troops and connected by express riders. The stockades would serve not only as points of supervision for the continental line but also as a “people’s highway,” protecting settlers as they migrated westward and eventually flowering into towns. Still more: why not also, he wrote to the Russian ambassador, a system from St. Petersburg to the Pacific Ocean?
O’Reilly found a new telegraph to compete against Morse’s. With many promoters beginning to enter the telegraph market, many new instruments appeared for them to appraise: Henley’s “Magneto-Electric Telegraph,” needs no batteries; Hume’s “Electro-Phonetic Telegraph,” registering letters of the alphabet as different tones; Bakewell’s “Copying Electric Telegraph,” a proto-fax. Only months after his defeat in Kentucky, O’Reilly bought rights to a device invented by a British electrician-watchmaker named Alexander Bain. Bain’s electrochemical telegraph used the decomposing power of electricity to mark a revolving paper disk treated with potassium prussiate or other suitable compound. The message to be sent was punched beforehand on a perforated tape. The chemically treated disk recorded the message as blue dots and dashes. Once the tape was perforated, transmission flew—up to three times faster than by Morse’s instrument.
Morse saw in Bain’s telegraph “a new chapter of troubles.” Concerned, he made a rare excursion from Locust Grove to New York City, where Bain was exhibiting his system. What he saw reassured him. In the time it took a Bain operator to punch out the tape for transmission, his own telegraph could send three times as much text as the operator was preparing. And his patent, as he told Bain, covered the recording of signals by dots and dashes. Bain challenged this, alleging that a dotdash alphabetic code had been devised in 1827 by a Philadelphian named Swain, published in a book