Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [178]
The steed called Lightning (say the Fates,) Was tamed in the United States; ’Twas Franklin’s hand that caught the horse, ’Twas harnessed by Professor Morse.
Morse replied by acknowledging his dependence on Field for his “favorite dream,” cherished for twenty-three years—“that universal humanity is to be bound in a true social fraternity by instantaneous intercommunication of thought.”
Humanity would have to wait, however. The Adger returned to Port-aux-Basques, where it at last met up with the sailing bark from England, the Sarah L. Bryant, loaded with copper cable. Morse left no account of the fatal mishaps over the next week, which are known only through reports in the press. On August 22 rafts bringing ashore lumber to build a telegraph shack were split by breakers. The lumber was rescued by spectators who rushed armpit-deep into the water, and some dogs that clenched planks in their teeth and swam with them back to the beach. Three days later the ships started out across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to lay the cable. But they collided; the Adger carried away the Bryant’s shrouds. On a second attempt, the Adger’s four-inch-thick towline jammed in its side wheel; in trying to disengage the line the Bryant lost its anchor.
The ships resumed their attempt to lay the cable on the twenty-seventh, a beautiful morning although with a strong northwest breeze. Late in the afternoon, after about forty miles of cable had been put down, a gale swept the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Bryant pitched violently, in danger of being pulled under. It held on for hours, but near seven o’clock in the evening, a cry went up from the deck: “The cable is gone!” All forty miles of it sank, irretrievably. The expedition to complete the first stage of the transatlantic telegraph was over, a failure.
Morse and Field’s other guests returned to New York aboard the Adger the first week in September. Some at least stayed in a gala mood, holding a costume party and dancing the schottische. However battered, Field was determined to keep going. But he and his associates had lost about $350,000, a quarter of their capital. And manufacturing a new cable for the gulf would require several months, while the larger enterprise would be set back an entire year.
Morse had grown close to Field and his family. When writing to him, he sometimes sent a kiss for one of Field’s children; Field named a new son after him. What he found out a week or two after returning from Newfoundland therefore came as a nasty surprise. Field and his associates, he learned, had paid $100,000 for patent rights to a new telegraph, invented by a London-born Kentucky music teacher named David Hughes. Like the earlier House telegraph, it used a piano-like keyboard of twenty-eight keys, and printed letters of the alphabet. Its workings were complex, involving the synchronous movement of corresponding parts in the transmitter and receiver, kept in tandem by a spring that vibrated to produce a musical note of a certain pitch.
Field’s sudden interest in a rival telegraph upset Morse. But Field explained that he and his associates had bought the patent right preemptively. They simply wished, he said, to forestall the purchase of Hughes’ system by others who might use it in competition with the Morse system. Having been banqueted and toasted aboard the Adger, Morse accepted Field’s story. He assured Kendall that Field and his colleagues were acting openly and in good faith. “I am confident their designs towards me and also towards you, are of the most friendly and liberal character in their acquisition of the Hughes patent,” he said; “it was for the purpose of keeping it out of the hands of such men as … would not scruple to use it to my detriment, and to have it in the hands of friends.”
But two weeks later Morse’s restored confidence in Field turned to new concern. An article in the New York Herald entitled “Astounding Telegraphic