Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [169]
Having narrowed his claims, Morse applied for a seven-year extension of the patent. At the time, the Patent Office granted an extension only if the inventor could show that he had failed to receive a just remuneration during the usual fourteen-year term. For Morse this meant proving that he had made little or no money from his telegraph despite its steadily growing use and enormous public value. He spent six woeful months not only re-collecting correspondence, redrawing diagrams, and retaking depositions, but also figuring the economic value of his telegraph to stockholders and the public, and computing his experimental expenses and legal costs over the last fourteen years—at the same time fending off suits by O’Reilly and other competitors opposed to granting him the extension. “I never had any anxieties so tried as in this case of extension.”
But Morse succeeded here, too. The Patent Office calculated that over the years his patent had earned him a profit of $200,000. The Commissioner characterized this as “abundant compensation,” ordinarily. But some of the amount, he added, was doubtful because tied up in litigation, and “benefactors of their race” such as Morse were entitled to something beyond the “proper measure.” He therefore granted seven additional years of patent protection. To Morse the extra time seemed less a renewal than a beginning. It gave his invention a first life, a first real chance in the world: “it is, in fact, the moment to reap the harvest of so many years of labor, and expense, and toil.”
FOURTEEN
A True Social Fraternity
(1854–1856)
THE DECADE since Morse opened the Baltimore-Washington line had been an economic boom time, stimulating enormous growth in the telegraph business. In 1855 an estimated 42,000 miles of telegraph wire thrummed across the United States. Most messages were sent by businessmen, who in the expansion of capitalist enterprise needed new communication services to stay in touch with far-off markets. Their “telegrams”—the word entered the language in 1852—contained orders to buy or sell goods, instructions to pay money, reports of freighting and shipping. Operating synergistically with railroads, the steam press, and other new technologies, the telegraph was part of an emerging infrastructure for distributing goods throughout the growing nation.
By 1855, the telegraph had also spun off collateral businesses and a new technical and professional community. The ever-lengthening lines gave rise to firms that produced wires and poles. Although Morse and Vail continued to manufacture instruments embodying their ongoing improvements, Morse met the greatly increased demand for apparatus by licensing its manufacture to instrument makers, who found a new market for their skills. Mechanics and engineers developed more sensitive relays, primitive versions of duplex transmission, and other refinements and innovations. Those involved in telegraphy were kept informed by a specialized technical press that issued such journals as the American Telegraph Magazine and the National Telegraph Review.
The occupation of telegrapher emerged as part of a new lower-middle class of white-collar workers. Each of the twelve New York City telegraph offices employed about four young men as telegraphers and clerks. On the Morse lines, devices to produce a clear loud click (“sounders”) had replaced many of the paper-marking registers, increasing transmission speeds. With as many as six machines going at once, the noise in telegraph offices struck one visitor as a polyphonic clatter, like “a watchmaker’s shop—a sort of Babel-like confusion.”
The fifty or so small American telegraph