Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [166]
Morse’s expensive but fruitless court trials also left him disillusioned with American institutions, though lifelong he had held them up to despotic Europe as examples of American liberty. The American press, “relentless unscrupulous,” had poisoned public opinion against him, wholly in self-interest—“because cheap despatches must be had by the press, and the press must be indulged.” He blamed the American government, too, for woefully defective patent laws that failed to protect the nation’s inventors. Invaded and robbed, the inventor sues, then waits in vain for redress until the entire fourteen-year term of his patent has gone by, “exhausted in endless suits, and ruinous expense.” “It is not the way to encourage the Arts,” he concluded, “to drive the Artists into exile or to the insane hospital or to the grave.”
Becoming one of the most controversial men of his time in America, Morse wished above all to get out of the spotlight, to retire “from public gaze, from public notice, from public mention.” He rejoiced that through the blessing of God his telegraph had blessed the world. But the best return the world could make him would be to forget his name. After his long quest for glory what he most sought, he said, was “Obscurity.”
Ultimately, inevitably, The Great Telegraph Case came before the United States Supreme Court. It was axiomatic at the Patent Office that no patent was of value until the Court sustained it. Morse’s chance arrived through Henry O’Reilly, who had long vowed to appeal the judgment of a Kentucky circuit court that his Zook-Barnes Columbian telegraph infringed Morse’s patent. The Supreme Court agreed to review O’Reilly’s case, its first scrutiny of the epoch-marking technology.
O’Reilly was in less than fighting condition. With several expensive suits pending against him, his financial situation had further deteriorated, not to mention, he said, “the losses & mortification (I might say, agony) which I have suffered.” Morse was content to remain at Locust Grove, but Kendall and several other friends and associates insisted that he attend: “the judges are men, and are influenced no little by your presence,” one wrote from Washington. “This point is the pivot of all your life’s affairs and you must be here.”
Morse spent two weeks in Washington at the end of December 1852, when O’Reilly v. Morse began. At the time, the Supreme Court’s chamber was located on the ground floor of the Capitol, north wing. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presided, a scrawny man with a bulging forehead who would soon rule, in Dred Scott v. John Sanford, that slaves and their descendants had no rights as American citizens. Kendall had worked closely with him during the Jackson administration, when Taney served as Secretary of the Treasury. Morse was at least acquainted with the Chief Justice, on whom New York University had conferred an honorary LL.D. When Morse opened the Baltimore-Washington line in 1844, too, Taney had sent a ceremonial message over the astonishing wire to President Tyler.
Six hours were allowed each side to argue before the seven justices, including the demonstration of telegraph apparatus. The hundreds of pages of argument defy brief summary. The lawyers covered much familiar ground—the history of electric telegraphy since the eighteenth century, The Sully Story. They also presented depositions from prominent scientists (including Joseph Henry, on behalf of O’Reilly), and cited scores of American and English legal precedents. Then as now, legal debate about information technology proved to be of mind-numbing intricacy. In trying to clarify the confusing issues, the lawyers explicated in detail, and often in deadly legalese, the meaning of terms such