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delight in his grandson Charles Lind. As a child in Puerto Rico, Charles had shown an aptitude for drawing. By now he maintained his own atelier in Paris, studying painting at Julien’s Academy and readying some pictures to be shown at the exposition. Morse invited the young man to dine with the family once or twice a week, and to visit often, proud that his own daughter’s son seemed determined to become a first-rate painter: “I tell him the mantel [sic] is going into the Lind branch.”

Despite the seductions of Paris and his advanced age, Morse spent most of his time working. “I have so many irons in the fire that I fear some must burn. But father’s motto was, ‘better wear out, than rust out.’ ” As one way of staying busy he represented a group called the American Asiatic Society. With the Suez Canal under construction, promising greatly increased commerce between East and West, the Society hoped to persuade maritime nations to join in encouraging global trade. The Society had in view, for instance, tapping the potentially lucrative resources of undeveloped regions like eastern Africa. As President of the group, Morse undertook to personally present a memorial to the Emperor, requesting that he convene during the Paris Exposition an international conference on world commerce.

However flatteringly received at court in his medals and chapeau bras, Morse found the Emperor unreachable. He got a runaround from officials, and was hampered by his inability, still, to speak French. Anyway, Napoleon was tied up in cabinet meetings, preoccupied with the current war between Austria and Prussia, which threatened to engulf the Continent. When he at last replied to Morse, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he said that he looked favorably on the Society’s project. But he declined calling a congress. Unable to get anywhere, Morse resigned his presidency.

Much other time Morse spent writing. The ever-present desire to prove his claim of priority had become obsessive as he aged. The need to do so in Europe was urgent, for the counterclaims that Dr. Charles Jackson had submitted to the Académie des Sciences decades ago remained unchallenged in the academy’s records and continued to circulate: “How slander sticks!” In Germany, the author of a Handbuch der angewandten Elektricitätslehre fully retold Jackson’s version of The Sully Story and summed up what it revealed: “we involuntarily arrive at the conclusion that Morse’s attention was first directed to the subject of the electric telegraph and the employment of electro-magnetism, through Jackson’s ideas.” Morse bought up many other new books and articles on the history of telegraphy that in his view perpetuated errors and lies about his originality. He filled the margins with protests: “Infamous! … Is this a fair statement? … Was there ever such barefaced falsehoods crowded into so small a space as in this note?!!”

Morse labored to set the record straight, “the pen in my hands from early morning to late at night.” He published two pamphlets in Paris, the first a reissue of Amos Kendall’s Full Exposure … of Dr. Charles T. Jackson, published in America in 1850. Undying trust in Jackson’s mendacities, he explained, demanded the “exhumation”—for which he wrote a new preface. Out of a mass of books and papers brought from home he also composed and published an elaborate self-defense, Modern Telegraphy. Some Errors of Dates of Events and of Statement in the History of Telegraphy Exposed and Rectified. The pamphlet consists of a fifty-page narrative of his early work on the telegraph, valuably illustrated with detailed drawings, plus thirty-eight pages of letters and depositions from people who had observed his work firsthand at the time. He based his defense on what he called the “philological position”—the literal meaning of the Greek tele graphos: “I WRITE, AT A DISTANCE.” All telegraphs before his own, that is, had been semaphores, designed to communicate information but not to record it. He sent dozens of copies of his pamphlets to highly placed persons in Paris and in England, and