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By Root 1496 0

Greek art.” The same day he visited the study of “the immortal Oersted.” He sat at the table on which the Danish scientist had observed that a wire carrying a current deflects a compass needle—a discovery, he said, that “laid the foundation of the science of electro-magnetism, and without which my invention could not have been made.” He bought a bust of Oersted at the Porcelain Museum, where by luck he encountered Oersted’s daughter—the living likeness of the bust and of her celebrated father.

From Copenhagen Morse and Sarah proceeded to St. Petersburg. Fifteen years earlier he had offered his telegraph for sale to the autocratic Czar Nicholas I. The Czar refused it, but the Russian government had nevertheless been using his system the entire time—without acknowledgment or compensation. Now St. Petersburg was getting ready for the coronation of Nicholas’ reform-minded son, Alexander II, who in five years would emancipate the serfs. Morse thought the city the most sumptuously splendid he had seen in all his travels, its churches and palaces displaying profusions of gold and pearls, nosegays of emeralds and sapphires.

Through the American minister to Russia, Morse met Alexander at Peterhof, the luxurious royal estate founded by Peter the Great, seventeen miles from St. Petersburg across the Gulf of Finland. Arriving at the Peterhof quay about nine-thirty in the morning, he was drawn in a coach by richly caparisoned black horses to one of the palaces, part of which had been assigned to American guests. He found his name written on the door of an apartment already prepared for him, where servants in gold lace presented breakfast on silver plates. The same afternoon, a coach emblazoned with the imperial double-headed eagle sped him to the Czar’s palace. Passing through a long anteroom lined on both sides by liveried attendants, he joined the deputations for the coronation ceremonies, a glittering company of princes, nobles, and distinguished persons from all over the Continent.

A Master of Ceremonies mustered Morse into a receiving line to meet the thirty-seven-year-old Czar, who wore military costume, a blue sash across his breast. The M.C. identified him to Alexander as “Mr. More.” When Morse repeated the name correctly, the Czar exclaimed: “Ah! that name is well known here; your system of Telegraph is in use in Russia.” Alexander said he hoped Morse enjoyed St. Petersburg; the line moved on, into the drawing room of the Czarina.

Among the forty-seven guests at dinner that evening Morse was seated next to one of the wealthiest noblemen in England and opposite three European princes. Nearby sat the former British foreign minister, Lord Granville, and Prince Esterházy of Hungary, the scabbard of his sword blazing with diamonds. Twenty servants in Imperial scarlet set out every variety of costly food and wine. Morse lingered over coffee before accepting an invitation from Granville to board his steam yacht for a sociable excursion back to St. Petersburg, along with Sir Robert and Lady Peel.

Passionate republican though Morse was, it delighted him to be hobnobbing with royals and bluebloods. His denunciations of them had always conflicted with his reverence for social hierarchy and his aesthetic enjoyment of panoply. And he welcomed their tasteful polite company as relief from the angry turmoil of much of his current life in democratic America—the fractious Abolitionists, the brawling immigrant Irish, the Fog Smiths and Daniel Craigs barking at his heels. He left Russia full of praise for the grandees he had mingled among, the “truly amiable and kind-hearted” Czar and Czarina, the affable and intelligent titled Britishers, “with none of the hauteur which we attach in America, sometimes unjustly, to English noblemen.”

Before leaving St. Petersburg, Morse presented through the American minister a thirty-page petition to the new Czar, setting forth a claim to some compensation for the use of his telegraph. Uncertain about how much to ask, however, he withdrew the petition before it reached Alexander. Instead, he hired an agent