Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [223]
Morse did return. Although he sometimes spoke of his life in Paris as “my exile” and thought of settling there, the dissipation of European society began to wear on him. He longed again for the quiet of Locust Grove and a Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Church, “the steady, rational, religious habits of our own Countrymen.” Since adolescence the Son of The Geographer had yearned to travel. Heading home he was nearly eighty years old, and crossing the Atlantic for the sixteenth time: “my age admonishes me that, in all probability, I shall never again visit Europe.”
Although more than a quarter century in use, Morse’s telegraph remained for many people an astonishment—“the greatest triumph of the human mind,” as one newspaper put it, “the most direct proof of man’s conquest of nature.” It had spread ever more rapidly, too; the more stations that became connected the faster the network grew. And telegraphy now reached Asia. In 1870 a line went up in the Mikado’s palace and sent the first message in Japan, reading: “The Emperor is highly pleased with the wonderful Western invention.” The Chinese government had been wary of the telegraph as a threat to its sovereignty, a means of prying the country open to foreign influence. But in 1871, after much public and official resistance, a four-digit code representing Chinese characters began whizzing through the dianxian, “lightning wires.”
Morse’s globe-circling invention gave him a quasi-mythical stature not much less fabulous than that of Washington. Engravings of him hung in many American homes, based on Christian Schussele’s famous Men of Progress (1862), a group portrait that imagines nineteen American inventors gathered in one room. Morse sits at the central table beside his telegraph, the focal point of the scene. Visitors to the U.S. Capitol who peered upward to the dome, now frescoed by Constantino Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington (1866), saw a giant Raphaelesque Morse, in company with Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, and Minerva, goddess of the arts. Americans in all stations of life sent worshipful fan letters: “I can hardly tell how to express myself to you of the great obligation the People are under to you for the perciveriance in your worke [sic].” Other letters reached Morse’s town house with no more address than “Inventor of the Telegraph/New York City.” A photograph arrived from a couple he did not know, showing the child they had christened “S. F. B. Morse Ebbinghaus.”
Christian Schussele, Men of Progress (National Portrait Gallery)
Despite his fabulous renown, Morse’s last four years were a grim crescendo of unhappiness and abuse. Immediately upon his return to the United States, he discovered that Locust Grove had been burglarized, the locks broken. His town house, mistreated by its tenants, needed thousands of dollars in repairs. Pictures he stored in the cellar had been eaten through by rats.
Four months later Morse learned that his brother Richard was gone. Richard had never overcome what he called his “mental depression arising from ill health.” Wandering as usual, he had died in Bavaria of liver cancer. “And so the triple cord is broken,” Morse wrote, “the youngest, is the first of us to pass the dark valley.” He felt the blow more than he supposed possible.
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