Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [171]
Field moved quickly. He interested several big investors, who in the spring of 1854 sent a delegation to Newfoundland. The group secured from the provincial government a grant of fifty square miles of land and a fifty-year monopoly on the construction and operation of telegraphs, plus £5000 for building a road across the province. The legislature granted a charter incorporating Field and his partners as the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company.
Cyrus W. Field (ca. 1860) (Carte-de-visite by Mathew Brady) (New-York Historical Society)
Field’s oracular venture became a major topic of the day. It drew some ridicule: “All idea of connecting Europe with America by lines extending directly across the Atlantic,” an American newspaper remarked, “is utterly impracticable and absurd.” Far more often, however, Field’s plan was hailed as a mindboggling fulfillment of modern commerce and technology: “it is impossible to contemplate the probability of such an achievement,” the New York Tribune said, “without a glow and a thrill at its sublime audacity and its magnificent uses.” The prospect of instant communication between continents stirred utopian fantasies of universal brotherhood, promising what another paper called “a more sympathetic connection of the nations of the world than has yet existed in history.”
Morse shared this ideology of redemption through communication and predicted an end to war “in a not distant future.” Together with his patent extension, an association with Field’s daring project meant a fresh start, a new beginning of his career. He invested $10,000 in the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, a one-tenth interest. Enthusiastically, he gave the company patent rights to his system for a line between Maine and New York City—free of charge. He also agreed to promote the company’s efforts to induce other American telegraph companies to transmit messages sent by the transatlantic cable at half price. The company placed him on its board of directors and advertised him as its “Electrician,” an honorary title.
Morse tried to make it generally known that he had been interested in suboceanic communication for more than a decade. He reminded many correspondents that in 1842 he had publicly attempted to telegraph across the East River. He often quoted the prophecy he had made a year later in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury: “a Telegraphic communication on my plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic! Startling as this may seem now, the time will come when this project will be realized.” But the many experimenters on both sides of the Atlantic now tackling problems of submarine telegraphy included several claimants to priority in the idea of a transoceanic line. Morse rebuffed them with smarmy graciousness, professing “the most respectful and kindly feeling” before laying out the crushing evidence against their delusions. “You will not feel offended if I give you facts,” he wrote to one rival, “though they may be fatal to your honest supposition … that you can claim priority in the suggestion of a Telegraph across the Atlantic.”
Morse took up eagerly the many practical questions raised by the cable-laying enterprise, some of great theoretical significance. He arranged to use part of the New York-Buffalo line for new experiments to determine the battery strength needed to communicate over very long distances. He examined various types of cable and insulating material, and offered Field detailed speculations on which would serve best. He suggested using one-eighth-inch wire of the purest copper, wound in shellac-saturated cotton or linen thread, then coated with gutta-percha—a latex that retains its plasticity under extreme pressure, previously used to