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By Root 1567 0

for Europe he wrote a biographical sketch of “my venerated Father.” He remembered not primarily Jedediah’s acts of benevolence—as when he gave the profits from his geographies to the needy—but more strikingly his Christian forgiveness of injuries. He recalled how his father addressed the flock who had driven him from his pulpit, quoting the words of Paul to the Ephesians: “Let all bitterness and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.” His memory could summon up no more vivid image of his father than of Jedediah praying with choked tears for those who had injured him.

Morse and Sarah departed for Europe on June 7, taking with them their six-year-old son, Willie. They had to make the voyage without Cyrus Field, however. Field telegrammed to say he had moved his own passage up to July, owing to the illness of his eldest daughter. He said he could arrange for Morse to make the same change, so that they could still cross the Atlantic together. “My arrang. are now so fixed,” Morse telegrammed back, “I fear I can’t wait.”

FIFTEEN

Can’t! Sir, Can’t!

(1856–1857)

FROM THE TIME Morse and Sarah arrived in London, his four months abroad were a personal triumph. He knew that his telegraph had been widely introduced overseas, but the extent came as a surprise. Putting up at Fenton’s Hotel in St. James, he was lionized, “overwhelmed with calls and the kindest and most flattering attentions.” When he visited a London telegraph office he saw his own instruments at work, sending and receiving messages across the Channel to and from Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere on the Continent. He also learned that British telegraph companies were thinking of substituting his system for Wheatstone’s over long internal lines. “Thus the way seems to be made for the universal adoption of my Telegraph throughout the whole world.”

After about ten days, Morse and Sarah moved on briefly to Paris, and a welcome no less heartening. He discovered that France still used a dial system designed by the scientific-instrument maker Louis Bréguet. But it was beginning to be replaced by a modified Morse apparatus, and an international Morse line already served between France and Germany. In a large telegraph office he saw twenty Morse telegraphs all operating at once, “my own children … chatting and chattering as in our American offices.” His friend and advocate Arago had died, but the current head of French telegraphs complimented his system as “the simplest and the best.” And during his stay Emperor Napoleon III, Napoleon’s grandnephew, awarded him one of France’s highest honors, the Légion d’Honneur.

Morse’s journey north toward Denmark brought further homage. Railroad travel on the Continent had greatly expanded since the time when he perforce rode by diligence and vettura. Tracks had been laid or nearly laid from Vienna to Prague, Paris to Marseilles, Venice to Milan. And at the railroad stations, he said, “I found my name a passport.” He bought second-class tickets but got seated in first-class cars; his luggage passed customs with only a show of inspection. Officials at the telegraph stations told him they used his and only his apparatus: “We have tried others, but have settled down upon yours as the best.” At the royal castle in Frederiksberg he was courteously received by Frederick VII, King of Denmark. A thickset man in a blue frock coat, Frederick asked his opinion of the idea of a transatlantic telegraph, which Morse assured him was practicable and certain to be realized. The King later conferred on him the Cross of the Order of Dannebrog, “in acknowledgment of the services you have rendered the world by the invention and successful establishment of the Electrical Telegraph.” A significant honor, membership in the Order was the modern equivalent of a knighthood.

Morse considered his visit to Copenhagen a pilgrimage. He spent several hours at the tomb and museum of Bertel Thorwaldsen, whom he had painted in Rome twenty-five years earlier and still rated as “the greatest sculptor since the best period of