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By Root 1541 0

O’Reilly saw huge new opportunities for himself. It freed him to build competing electrochemical lines on Morse’s major routes between New York City and Boston, Albany, and Washington. He opened a Bain telegraph office at 29 Wall Street, elegantly fitted up with plate glass and mahogany furniture, virtually next door to the office of Morse’s New York, Albany & Buffalo company. Morse heard that at least one Bain line was using his relays. But Kendall advised him to do nothing, at least for the present. If O’Reilly’s Bain lines proved inefficient they would be no threat; meanwhile they would quiet outcries against the Morse patentees as monopolists. “But we should be ready to attack them if they are likely to be formidable,” Kendall added.

Using Bain’s system, O’Reilly also planned to resume work on his potentially lucrative line to New Orleans. He went to court seeking release from the 1848 injunction that had forbidden him to build in Kentucky. Morse wrote out a twenty-page deposition for the trial. But O’Reilly won. “The good time has come,” his latest circular proclaimed; “Mr. O’Rielly [sic] has triumphed, and completely at that, for he has cut loose from Morse.”

Morse and Kendall tried to convince the public that the triumph had no other existence than in O’Reilly’s say-so. The judge’s narrow decision, they pointed out, stated only that an earlier court’s injunction against O’Reilly’s use of the Columbian telegraph in part of Kentucky did not apply to his use of Bain’s telegraph. It might turn out that Bain’s dotdash code infringed Morse’s patent. For that reason the judge had ordered O’Reilly to provide bond with securities. Should an infringement be determined, O’Reilly would have to pay Morse costs and damages. So the Observer, too, issued a proclamation: “Professor Morse has been fully sustained.”

The rival cries of victory confused the public, but not O’Reilly. By mid-1850 he succeeded in opening his sure-to-be-moneymaking thousand-mile People’s Telegraph between Louisville and New Orleans.

In his handsome Tuscan villa with his young wife, Morse often felt deeply depressed. The piracy of his patent and unending legal tumult, he said, “leave me but little enjoyment of my life.” The thousands of dollars paid out to lawyers hurt too, leaving him without cash. Kendall wanted to engage full-time counsel. But with one topflight lawyer asking $2000 in cash and $2000 in stock, Morse estimated that legal fees would amount to $10,000 annually: “We may almost as well give up.”

Morse also faced attack from within. Jittery stockholders in Morse lines badgered him to guarantee the validity of his patents. He felt neither obliged nor inclined to do so. When their complaints came by mail he sent them on to Kendall, only to have the complainers appeal again over Kendall’s head to him. The board of directors of one Morse company voted to withhold dividends from him and the other patentees, retaining the money as security pending the validation of his patent. When he vehemently protested, the company president told him off: “Your want of knowledge of the method of doing business … is too apparent to need any thing further than a passing remark.”

And try as he might to keep out of the courts, Morse was engulfed by paperwork in readying himself over and over for trial. Again and again, with wearying sameness and vexation, he had to sift through growing piles of correspondence, affidavits, depositions, contracts, bills, and newspaper clippings destined for citation in shelves full of trial records, an “interminable labarinth [sic] of evidence, requiring the utmost minutiae of details & of hair splitting logic to defeat the cunning & knavery and persevering machinations of the pirates.” Hundreds of manuscript pages survive in which he repeatedly tried to narrate the history of his invention and define its essential originality in such a way as to make it invulnerable to attack or imitation.

The definition was crucial. All of Morse’s opponents in court argued that his patent protected only the particular instruments and alphabet