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But then there was Joseph Henry. Morse’s quarrel with him had erupted afresh every few years for a decade. And he heard that after four years of silence Henry would soon reply to his free-swinging ninety-page Defence (“Attack!”). Among other affronts, Morse’s tract denied Henry any part in developing the Morse system and questioned his originality and credibility. Deeply offended, Henry damned the work as “wanton foolish and libellous” and privately called Morse a coward. To deflect the blow when it came, Morse suggested to brother Sidney that the Observer mention his diploma from the Swedish Academy of Sciences and his gold medals for science from the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria.

But Henry replied on a scale Morse had not imagined. He submitted his case to the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, asking them to investigate and issue a report: “regard to my own memory, to my family, and to the truth of history,” he explained, “demands that I should lay this matter before you.” To evaluate the many letters and documents Henry presented, the Regents appointed a committee of inquiry that included two U.S. senators and the president of Harvard College.

The Smithsonian committee acquitted Henry of every failing and wrongdoing alleged in Morse’s Defence. They denounced the tract as nothing more than character assassination, “a disingenuous piece of sophisticated argument, such as an unscrupulous advocate might employ to pervert the truth, misrepresent the facts, and misinterpret the language in which the facts belonging to the other side of the case are stated.” Carefully documented and widely cited, the Smithsonian report made its way overseas, too. A leading Paris scientific journal, it infuriated Morse to learn, took up Henry’s cause: “Morse is in effect the legal inventor [l’inventeur legal] of the electric Telegraph. The patents are in his name, the honors & rewards have fallen to him, but the real inventor [l’inventeur réal] is Professor Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington.”

The detailed case that Henry presented to the Regents belongs to his biography rather than to Morse’s. It should be said, however, that it gave Morse no credit for the restless, thoughtful, continual tinkering and experiment by which he had devised and improved his telegraph. Morse viewed the report as snobbish and politically inspired. It placed Henry “in that superhuman class of men of mind, while I am treated as belonging to the mechanical class.” It issued, too, from a Washington clique composed of members of the Coast Survey, the Smithsonian, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Henry had been president. Many talented men belonged to these organizations, to be sure, but also many “toadies and pretenders” who sought advancement by kowtowing to Henry. “Henry is King on the Smithsonian throne, and as I have committed treason in their eyes by daring to inculpate this Sovereign, I am to be decapitated.”

Morse began preparing an answer but put it aside, perhaps in frustration. One moment he was being singled out for exalted honors by “the highest scientific minds of Europe, and … the principal governments of the Old World.” The next moment his indemnity was being raided, his patents besieged, himself “arraigned, tried and condemned” by Regents and Senators. The sequence demonstrated once again how his life took shape as reversals and contradictions. Gain became loss, reward was punishment: “when any special and marked honor has been conferred upon me there has immediately succeeded, some event of the envious or sordid character.” Brooding on the matter, he speculated that it might be the moral equivalent of the physical law of equilibrium. Take for instance the antagonism between the opposite poles of a magnet: “if the positive be strengthened, the negative is also in an equal degree strengthened and visa [sic] versa.” Similarly, “If upon anyone reputation and honors increase,