Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [173]
As he waited out the year, Morse took another of his occasional intermissions, in part to reorder his business affairs. His tormentors no longer included Henry O’Reilly. However colorfully bold, the “Napoleon of the Telegraph” was in his own way no less naive about business than was Morse. Wildly overextended, his People’s Telegraph to New Orleans a financial disaster, he went bankrupt, his furniture and other property seized and sold to pay his debts. The lines he had owned passed into other hands. Many of the lines had been poorly built and often broke down, so many of the companies that bought them also went bankrupt. His days as a power in the frantic telegraph business ended, O’Reilly took a clerical job in New York City, accepting daily wages to meet his family’s needs.
Not only O’Reilly was out of the way. Morse believed that the patent extension dissolved his contractual links to his partners in the original patent, leaving him free to act without consulting them. Alfred Vail could legally claim no interest in the extension, but on Kendall’s advice Morse gave him a continuing one-eighth share. Vail had decided anyway to quit telegraphy. He owned nearly $50,000 worth of stock in eight telegraph and railroad companies, but only about a fifth of it paid dividends. And he could find no more lucrative job than superintending a line from Washington to Columbia, South Carolina, at a demeaning annual salary of only $900. “I have made up my mind to leave the Telegraph to take care of itself,” he told Morse, “since it cannot take care of me.” Not an easy person to get along with—full of “morbid suspicions,” Morse said—Vail left gloomily: on bad terms with Kendall, feeling cheated by Smith, resentful toward Morse for failing to publicly acknowledge his contributions to the telegraph. His health had declined as well. The cares and worries of his service to Morse cost him what he described as “a termination of blood to the brain.” His physician advised him to “seek a rustic life.”
Vail returned to Morristown, New Jersey, site of his family’s Speedwell Iron Works. Semi-retired, he spent his time doing electrical experiments, compiling a mammoth Vail genealogy, annotating the many sermons he read, and arranging his scrapbooks and correspondence. He stayed in touch with Morse, occasionally meeting with him in New York. Rummaging around, he discovered some cast-off equipment from the early days of their partnership—a roll of the first telegraph paper they used, the model of the classic transmission key he had invented in Washington. He returned them to Morse, obviously still feeling some bond with his former teacher. Upon the death of his wife of thirteen years—a “crushing affliction,” he said, that left him weeping “bitter tears in loneliness”—he offered Morse $250 to design a monument to her.
Morse believed that the extension also voided Fog Smith’s share in his patent. “Consequently,” he said with vast relief, “the annoyances of Smith are at an end, so far as the necessity of consulting him is concerned.” Hoping to keep the peace, however, on Kendall’s advice he offered Smith an interest in his extended patent, as he had done with Vail. “The animal,” as Morse called him, brusquely rejected the offer and sued him for the same share in the extended patent as in the first.
And Smith won his case. A “legal swindle,” Morse moaned, but not exactly surprising, “for he is in his element, and I am not.” Having won his suit, “that incubus,” as Morse also called him, announced that he, too, would make a new start. Acting under what he conceived to be the terms