Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [192]
The two crises, only a few hours apart, left behind them an atmosphere of foreboding. And at about three-forty-five in the morning, the cable began racing out again, this time over the feeding wheels. The paying-out machinery was equipped with brakes to slow or halt the flow. As Morse recounted what happened next, the chief engineer of Atlantic Telegraph, Charles Bright, ordered the application of an extra hundred pounds of braking force. The brakeman questioned the wisdom of his order, but Bright had designed the paying-out machinery himself and he persisted.
As the Niagara steamed on, the length of cable on its deck was stretched taut. Held by the brake, it pulled against the hundreds of tons of cable lying on the ocean floor behind the ship. The already rending tension increased as the Niagara’s, stern rose and fell in the moderately heavy sea. “Such circumstances,” Morse wrote, “would have parted a cable of 4 times the strength. Hence it is no wonder that our cable subjected to such a tremendous & unnatural strain should snap like a pack thread.”
One end of the broken cable swung loosely over the stern. The other end dropped in the Atlantic Ocean and vanished—together with three hundred miles of five-strand, triple-sheathed copper wire. With the sun beginning to rise, everyone aboard the Niagara rushed to the deck, gathered in groups, conversed in subdued voices. “I believe there was not a man in the ship,” Morse said, “who did not feel really as melancholy as if a comrade had been lost overboard.”
Also lost overboard was the Columbus-rivaling, God-glorifying Event of the Age. News of the ruinous accident reached America two weeks later, evoking both sympathy and skepticism. Many judged the expedition a noble failure: “When we consider the courage which could undertake this Herculean feat,” the Tribune editorialized, “we are almost as proud of our age as if everything had gone on smoothly, and the lightning were now leaping from continent to continent.” Others found a sobering lesson for Americans: “we cannot but fear that the success so much hoped for, will not be so easily and so readily attained as our always over sanguine people seem to expect.” Some suspected a coverup, wondering whether “the failure of the undertaking was more complete than has been reported, and … there is some disagreeable fact connected with it, not yet given to the public.”
Morse contributed to public uncertainty about the cause of the failure. As he retold the Niagara affair, it was “the fatal mistake of Mr. Bright, which caused the breaking.” His account was published in the Observer, widely quoted, and accepted as authoritative. Scientific American, a popular weekly founded twelve years earlier, repeated in a lead editorial Morse’s condemnation of the “fatal mistake of Mr. Bright” and gibed that “Mr. Bright is evidently not bright enough to lay a telegraph cable.” The young engineer, although barely twenty-five years old, was at least bright enough to have patented two dozen inventions, and to defend himself. He wrote to Morse denying that he had ordered any change in the force of the brakes. “I gave the man at the brake no orders to alter the adjustment,” he said, “nor did he demur to any, nor make any such observation as you allude to.” The accident occurred, he insisted, while he was in the electrical room belowdecks.
In fact, Morse’s accusations against Bright were irresponsible. At the time the cable ruptured, Morse was in his berth, confined there again by his leg injury. His report of the braking incident represented not what he saw and heard, as he implied, but what others told him. After Bright challenged his hearsay narrative, he publicly acknowledged through the Observer that he had not witnessed the “fatal mistake.” He had given his account in a private letter, he said,