Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [197]
Morse had rarely traveled with his children, and a few weeks en famille in Switzerland drained him. “It was a great mistake I committed in bringing my family,” he wrote from Interlaken; “I have scarcely had one moment’s pleasure, and am almost worn out with anxieties and cares.” In heading for Paris, he left ten-year-old Arthur with Sarah’s mother in Geneva, to be educated by a tutor. “Children require to be early and sometimes frequently transplanted, like some plants,” he explained. He had after all been sent from home himself at the age of eight—a “judicious beginning.” Arthur had shown signs of rudeness, disobedience, and pleasure in low company, for which Morse had recommended a few days’ “severe discipline.” The boy evidently did not take well to being left in Switzerland, for Morse received from the tutor a report of new misbehavior. “I hope Mr. Binet has no occasion to punish you,” he wrote to Arthur, “but if there is occasion I hope for my sake and your good he will punish you …. I shall thank him.”
Morse and Sarah reached Paris about the first week in August. The international meeting on the indemnity was scheduled to convene in the city on the twenty-third, but meanwhile he and millions of others thrilled to breathtaking news. Using Morse instruments, Cyrus Field’s group had successfully flashed a telegraphic message 2500 miles through the Atlantic Ocean.
The miracle had not come easily. Earlier in the summer the Niagara, with revamped paying-out machinery, had again started out with its Anglo-American squadron to the mid-Atlantic. In fierce storms and forty-foot-high waves, the frigate nearly capsized, injuring some of the crew. The cable broke three times, with a loss of 540 miles of line. The Niagara and the Agamemnon had rendezvoused again late in July and successfully spliced their cable-ends together. Speeding apart from each other, they spooled out cable toward their appointed shores. The Niagara reached Newfoundland on the same day the Agamemnon reached Ireland, August 5.
After ten days of testing, the cable pulsed with the first official transatlantic message. In part it consisted of one of the two scriptural texts Morse had chosen for the failed expedition the year before: “Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men.” Some days later, Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan electrically exchanged congratulations. On August 27 the New York Tribune reported the signing of a three-way peace treaty by China, England, and France, in a story headlined “The First News Dispatch by Ocean Telegraph.”
Americans greeted the event as a rebeginning of history, remaking the idea of human society. “A mighty though silent transformation in the conditions of human existence has just been effected,” the New York Tribune announced; “we have been thrown into the immediate intellectual neighborhood of the whole civilized and a large portion of the semi-barbarous world.” Mind could now be “Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea,” Ralph Waldo Emerson exulted in a poem: “We have few moments in the longest life/Of such delight and wonder.” The delight broke out in festivities across the country: a torchlight procession in Detroit; barrels of tar set afire at every street corner of Cincinnati; a nighttime regatta in Pittsburgh; a 100-gun salute on Boston Common, the city’s bells rung for a full hour.
New Yorkers closed their businesses, put up triumphal arches, and enjoyed what the city’s noted diarist George Templeton Strong called an “orgasm of glorification.” Vessels in port flew the Stars and Stripes, Union Jack, and flags of all nations. Houses and shops were festooned and illuminated, some by special gas pipes laid for the occasion, Fifth Avenue’s Brevoort House by 1500