Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [22]
While Finley’s spiritual life flourished, his plans for studying in Europe collapsed. The Judgment of Jupiter, on display in Boston for a year, found no buyer. Neither did his Dying Hercules, on exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy; the painting was too large for any private house, he was told. Some of his pictures had also been shown in New York, but a downturn in the city’s commercial affairs left no prospect of selling them for a reasonable profit. There were other discouragements. A Philadelphia bookseller commissioned from him a portrait of ex-president John Adams, to be engraved and included in a biographical encyclopedia of distinguished Americans. Finley produced a harsh memento mori of Adams in old age, shrunken and rheumy-eyed. The bookseller refused to publish it, advising Finley that those who saw the picture “universally disapproved” of it.
Anyway, Finley’s engagement to Lucrece had turned his attention from study in Europe to earning a dependable family income. He began to rethink his career. Before leaving England he had announced that he would never become a portrait painter. Now he thought that he should perhaps return to London to perfect himself in commercial portraiture. He had an even more extreme thought. He had announced that as a history painter his aim would be to lend his own Raphaelesque luster to America’s rising “constellation of genius.” Now it occurred to him that he should, perhaps, just give up art altogether.
Finley tried invention. Americans were becoming known for their “improvements”: new trusses for hernias, machines for making suspender buckles—better bobbins, doorknobs, pessaries, music stands. “There is no clinging to old ways,” a German visitor to the country remarked; “the moment an American hears the word ‘invention’ he pricks up his ears.” Finley set out to make a perhaps profitable “improvement,” together with his brother Sidney. Three years younger than Finley, Sidney too had recently undergone conversion, and he too was trying to find his place in the world. Finley believed that his brother had a gift for “philosophical research,” demonstrated in Sidney’s efforts to build a kite for human airborne navigation.
Experimenting together in the spring of 1817, Finley and Sidney invented a flexible leather piston. The device could be adapted to various methods of raising and forcing water—a bilge pump in ships, a machine for watering gardens. (Sidney satirized it as “Morse’s Patent Metallic Double-Headed OCEAN-DRINKER and DELUGE-SPOUTER VALVE Pump-Boxes.”) The brothers secured an American patent for their invention, sought an overseas patent as well, and tried to interest foreign investors in promoting the device.
Finley’s and Sidney’s most promising use for the piston was in fashioning an improved fire engine. Simpler and easier to work than current engines of the same capacity and power, and half the price, it would bring fire-fighting machinery within the means of every village in the country. Finley showed a model of the engine to Benjamin Silliman, his former science professor at Yale. It interested Silliman so much that he asked for a set of drawings and specifications to print in the first issue of his new periodical, the American Journal of Science, soon to become the country’s main channel for scientific papers. Finley also got a valuable endorsement from the famous inventor Eli Whitney, who pronounced the engine superior to those in common use. “Every one thinks we shall make our fortunes if it succeeds,” Finley wrote.
But at the