Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [167]
For Taney and the other justices, the case resolved itself into two basic questions. Most important, was Morse the “first and original inventor” of the electromagnetic telegraph described in his patents? If so, was O’Reilly’s Columbian telegraph “substantially different” from it?
Morse’s side tried to show that the Columbian infringed every claim in Morse’s patent, being identical with his telegraph “in object, beginning and ending.” O’Reilly’s distinguished counsel, Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, addressed the Court’s basic questions by arguing that the “first” telegraphs had been invented abroad by Wheatstone, Steinheil, and Davy. He conceded that Morse had created the first practicable electromagnetic “marking” telegraph. But he emphasized how much Morse’s apparatus owed to earlier scientists and inventors:
[Morse] did not invent the art of telegraphing by electro-magnetism. He did not invent the battery; nor the circuit of wire, or wire and earth; nor the electro-magnet. He did not discover the transmissibility of the electric current through a long circuit. He did not invent the combination of the battery and its circuit with an electro-magnet, or electro-magnets placed in any part of it so as to move levers or soft iron bars suspended near their poles and thus produce mechanical results at a distance. He did not invent the process of marking paper….
Using the same available technology, Chase told the justices, other inventors had devised telegraphs no less useful and ingenious than Morse’s and as much entitled to patent protection. This included the Columbian telegraph, which he defended as an improvement upon Morse’s apparatus, not an infringement.
Morse considered the outcome in the Supreme Court critical to his future. “It involves wealth on the one side and comparative poverty on the other to me. If the decision is against me, I shall be compelled to sell my pleasant home.” After hearing both sides, however, the justices chose not to rule on the matter in their present session, but to ponder its complexities while in recess. As Morse waited, false reports and rumors about their opinions leaked out constantly. It was a long wait. The Court did not render judgment for a full year.
The decision would test Morse’s long-held view of himself as the sole creator of the electromagnetic recording telegraph. All achievements in the arts and sciences are in many respects connected and cumulative, of course. And his invention was constituted and forwarded by the work of pioneer electrical experimenters, contemporary scientists, academic colleagues, skilled mechanicians, continental inventors—by Volta, Henry, Gale, Vail, Bréguet, to name only some. Morse’s image of himself as the Lone Inventor took off from his earlier sense of being the “Son of the Geographer,” scion of a family whose intellectual independence he saluted in jotting down a brief scroll of honor:
First Geography of the United States. Jedd. Morse
First Religious Society in house of Jedd. Morse
First Religious Newspaper Sidney E. Morse
First Telegraph (in the literal sense of the term) S. F. B. Morse
First Course of Lectures on Fine Arts in U. States S. F. B. Morse
Much in Morse’s later experience and the thought of his era also disposed him to think himself the Lone Inventor—his Washingtonian ideal of national honor; his heroic conception of The Painter, independent of patrons; the antebellum ethic of the Self-Made Man; romantic notions of Genius.
Ironically, Morse’s claims for himself as an innovator rest most convincingly on the part of his work he valued least, his dogged entrepreneurship. With stubborn longing, he brought his invention into the marketplace despite congressional indifference, frustrating delays, mechanical failures, family troubles, bickering partners, attacks by the press, protracted lawsuits, periods of depression. Whatever the demands for