Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [163]
As he usually did, Morse tried to stay out of the dispute and urged Kendall to compromise: “the excitement of such perpetual litigation as we have to encounter,” he said, “sometimes distorts in our own minds the sense of right.” Kendall warned him that Smith would view their desire for a settlement as a sign of weakness, and exploit it to make them give up rights: “the effect on such a man can only be to confirm and strengthen him in his fraudulent course.” He pressed Morse to confront Smith in court. For Morse the situation came down to a choice between miseries. On balance he preferred Smith’s trouble-making to the worse exasperations of the law. “Let us bear it as agreeably as we can,” he told Kendall, “make up our minds to suffer a little for our want of caution.” Trying to bring the two men together, he wrote to Smith several times, addressing him with polite impartiality. “Much allowance should be made on both sides,” he typically began.
But Smith allowed Morse nothing. Instead, he made several new enemies for him by granting Ezra Cornell a patent right to build a 400-mile line from New York City to western New York State, in competition with the existing and profitable line of the New York, Albany & Buffalo company. Its directors angrily (and groundlessly) accused Morse of colluding with Smith, like a “double faced Judas.” Smith aroused further hostility toward Morse by enraging New York’s Associated Press. He had taken an intense dislike to its agent in Halifax, where transatlantic steamships first stopped when they reached the coast of North America, carrying news from abroad. Smith closed his Boston-New York line to the agent, refusing to allow him to telegraph the eagerly awaited international news to papers in New York City. The Herald warned that Smith’s blockade would “injure more seriously the prospects of Mr. Morse, than any ten men in the country, with all their original inventions at their back, could do.”
Kendall pleaded with Morse to take legal action: “The alternatives left are only submission or resistance.” Kendall’s threat of a lawsuit infuriated Smith: “Let him sue,” he told a friend; “I will blow Morse’s Patents Sky high, when I open my books. Nobody but myself, Professor Morse & the Almighty know what the facts are.” The supposedly explosive “facts” amounted to Morse’s delay in patenting his receiving magnet—an attempt, Smith called it, at “fraudulent & designed suppression and concealment.” Morse laughed off the trumped-up charge as “stuff of gossamer.” It proved that Smith should not be taken seriously. “F.O.G.—F.O.G. F.O.G. F.O.G. F.O.G F.O.G whew,” he told Kendall. “He threatens like a venomous serpent, but it is only the forked tongue not the fangs.”
But Smith’s threats were no bluff, as Morse learned in the hectic late summer and fall of 1850. At the time, Smith’s Boston-New York line itself faced competition from a man named Hugh Downing. Downing planned to build a line along the same route, installing Royal House’s piano-like printing telegraph. Smith decided to apply to the courts for an injunction to stop Downing, on the grounds that House’s apparatus infringed Morse’s patent. Downing meant to fight back by contesting the validity of the patent, using the well-worn testimony of Dr. Charles Jackson.
Smith wanted Morse to appear as a witness at the injunction trial to rebut Jackson. But Morse declined: “The idea of a monomaniac’s testimony weighing a feather … is ridiculous.” His disdain was not unreasonable. Jackson had recently added a new achievement to his invention of the telegraph and discovery of surgical ether. As principal U.S. geologist for the mineral lands in Michigan, he claimed that it was he, not a colleague, who had determined the age of the sandstone of Lake Superior. (The government