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Morse completed the 300-page manuscript around June 1869. He sent it on to Washington, where it was vetted by Professor W. P. Blake, general editor of the government reports. Surprised and disappointed by what Morse submitted, he twice wrote back tactfully asking for revisions. He recommended large cuts in the material on priority. Morse should take it for granted that he had invented “ the” telegraph: “For you to argue it … implies, at the least, that there is room for explanation and discussion.” Blake also asked for revision of another matter, “upon which I know that you are sensitive.” Scientists generally acknowledged the “radical importance and value” to the telegraph of the experiments of Joseph Henry, who went unmentioned in the report.

Morse conceded that on the priority issue he had been “too weakly sensitive.” But he more than ever had it in for Henry. He now believed that the influential attack on him published a decade ago by a prestigious committee of the Smithsonian Institution had actually been written by Henry himself, deceptively “prepared for the Committee to father.” Blake’s criticism caused him much puzzled distress. He drafted memo after memo and note after note, trying again and again to come up with some innocuous way of bringing Henry into the report.

Late in November the Government Printing Office issued Morse’s work, as Examination of the Telegraphic Apparatus and the Processes in Telegraphy. Whatever he may have cut from the manuscript, the 162-page published report remained largely a brief for himself, his final and fullest attempt to compile an unassailable historical record of his invention. “The Morse system was the introduction and the addition of a new art to the means of communicating at a distance …. It was emphatically the first realization of a telegraph.” In discussing the recently created telegraphs exhibited in Paris he explained that people tend to mistake modifications for entirely new things. “It will not be deemed egotistical on the part of an inventor,” he wrote, “if in the attempts of others to improve his invention he should now and then recognize the familiar features of his own offspring, and claim the paternity.” He therefore traced back to himself most of the “improvements” on display, including the invention of the “acoustic semaphore” (i.e., his sounder) and of submarine telegraphy. In passing he mentioned Henry’s work on the lifting power of electromagnets, slyly putting Henry down as someone who demonstrated “the practicability of ringing a bell by means of electro-magnetism at a distance.”

Morse’s difficulty in completing the report made up the lesser part of his misery at the time. He was forced to do some of his writing in bed, having injured his leg worse than ever before. Slipping on the stairs at Locust Grove, he fell with his whole weight and broke the leg in two places below the knee. Given his age, some feared he would not survive the shock. The injury laid him up for more than three months. After that, grown pale, he managed to hobble about on two sawhorse-like supports.

In August, having sent in his report but apparently still bedridden, Morse was confronted by a family crisis. Susan, Charles, and Finley, the children of his first marriage, had turned out to be helpless adults—gullible, sickly, or disabled. Two of the boys from his second marriage were turning out to be scoundrels. Twenty-year-old Arthur, for all his promise as a violinist, had a weakness for bad companions, a “disgusting filthy” habit of chewing tobacco, and little self-control. While abroad, in Dresden, he had nearly gotten into a duel with some young German army officers. His “rude brusqueness,” Morse lamented, belonged not to the family’s ideal of the Christian Gentleman but to “corner grocery New York rowdies.”

That August, Arthur got into serious trouble—serious enough for Morse to book him passage on a ship bound for Valparaiso. Hustling Arthur out of the country to Chile seems a desperate move, suggesting some offense on the