Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [225]
Morse’s recollections, however, can have left little doubt about how far Congress could be entrusted with the future of American telegraphy. He did not escape brutal criticism for his remarks, especially in James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, which favored government control. In several editorials the Herald questioned the intent of the banquet: “It is difficult … to resist the conviction that the affair was got up less for the purpose of honoring Professor Morse than of advancing the interests of the Western Union Telegraph Company.” If proof were needed, the Herald said, William Orton’s “execrable” remarks made it clear that the homage to Morse was propaganda for an offensive, “a decoy duck to affect a great lobby movement upon Congress.” The revered guest and the influential diners had been bought off, “to spread abroad the erroneous impression that the Professor and the company assembled to meet him were all opposed to the absorption of the telegraph in the postal system.”
Whether Morse understood that the Pain de faisans was in reality decoy duck is debatable. He may have conspired with Western Union, willing to endorse its cause. He approved the company’s drive for power, having always believed that only under a single management could the nation’s telegraph network provide efficient and reliable communications: “[Western Union] is becoming, doubtless, a monopoly,” he told Kendall, “but … its unity is in reality a public advantage.” And he had a large stake in the company’s success. All of his patents having expired in 1867, he could no longer look to them for income. Instead he had sunk his money in Western Union, making it “the basket in which I have all my eggs”—eggs here being stocks apparently worth $400,000. On the other hand, Morse may simply have been gulled. Western Union would not have been the first seeker after power and respectability to play on his hunger for medals, diplomas, honorary titles, and testimonial dinners.
Morse’s hefty report to the State Department turned out to be not much more welcome than his speech at Delmonico’s. Between the writing and the arduous collection or making of diagrams, maps, photographs, and statistical tables, the work only crept along. He failed to meet several deadlines: “I fear I have assumed at my age, a task above my strength.” As he labored, too, the report became less a review of the Paris Exposition than a personal testament, “to settle once for all the disputed claim of my right to be considered the Inventor of the Telegraph proper.”
Morse’s claim, however, had expanded. Although his telegraph entitled him to be considered the most influential inventor America had so far produced, he had come to call his own almost every feature of its development, as if conceding one conceded them all. “I assert a truth, when I say that the Telegraphic system which I devised in 1832… has had no essential improvement added to it, to this day.” He granted importance to advances in conducting wires, batteries, and the like. But whenever he received suggestions for some improving modification of his basic apparatus he bluntly repulsed them as attempts to question his priority and nibble away at his reputation. “In regard to the ‘Electro-magnetic conductor of which you inquire my opinion … I really see nothing new or particularly useful in the plan.” “The idea of such railroad telegraphing is not new. I patented in France in 1838 a system of Railroad telegraphing.” “An arrangement for prolonging the sound of the dash in two ways, differing