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—Bruno Latour, Aramis or The Love of Technology (1993)

BORN TWO YEARS after the inauguration of George Washington, Samuel F. B. Morse lived through the Civil War and the first administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. In that time, the land area of the United States quadrupled and its population grew tenfold, from four to forty million people. The nation’s newspapers printed front-page obituaries and lead editorials reviewing his long eventful life and assessing its significance. Many declared him one of the great men of American, perhaps of human, history. “If it is legitimate to measure a man by the magnitude of his achievements, the greatest man of the nineteenth century is dead” (Louisville Courier-Journal). “The first inventor of his age and century is dead!” (Patent Right Gazette). “Morse was, perhaps, the most illustrious American of his age” (New York Herald).

The encomia that followed praised Morse as, above all, a courageous benefactor. He had defied insult and injury to advance commerce, politics, journalism, and other everyday affairs—to better civilization itself. Only a few papers mentioned his influential career in painting and photography. And only a very few seem to have criticized his outspoken suspicion of immigrants and hatred of Catholics. The New York Golden Age, a weekly, recalled that he had passionately defended the right of one human being to hold another human being in chattel bondage: “Among the many … apologies for American slavery are some shameful passages from his pen.”

On April 5, Morse was buried beside his brothers Sidney and Richard amid the picturesque statuary and foliage of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, on a height overlooking the bay of New York City. His funeral occasioned a national day of mourning. Flags flew at half-mast. Telegraph operators draped their instruments in black. The New York Stock Exchange adjourned. Presses struck off elegies on Morse and Morse funeral marches. Artists gathered to express their debt for his founding of the National Academy of Design. Commenting on the nationwide outpouring of affection and praise, a speaker in Poughkeepsie offered what would have been for Morse the ultimate compliment: “Never since Washington died has such sympathetic unanimity been witnessed.”

The most imposing ceremony took place on April 16 at the House of Representatives. From its gallery hung an evergreen-wreathed portrait of Morse. Members of his family sat in the semicircle facing the Speaker’s desk, along with President Grant, his Cabinet, and justices of the United States Supreme Court. Throughout the memorial, receivers clicked off messages coming in from simultaneous meetings around the world—from telegraphers in London and in Java, Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, ex-President Millard Fillmore in Buffalo, the aldermen of Galveston, Texas. Typical was the telegram sent from a San Francisco gathering led by the city’s mayor: “Resolved. That, on behalf of the citizens of San Francisco and of the people of California, we recognize the inestimable services of Professor Samuel F. B. Morse …. His vast conception of enlisting electricity in the work of civilization was the grandest thought of time.” The collected telegrams and speeches, later published by the Government Printing Office, made a volume of 359 pages.

The often cruel controversy that had surrounded Morse’s invention lingered, mostly as a family feud. Amanda Vail hunted him for the next twenty years. Next to caring for Alfred’s children, she said, “I resolved that my life work … should be to rescue the memory of my dear husband in connection with his great work, from the oblivion into which Professor Morse had cast it.” She studied Vail’s voluminous papers and drawings, interviewed his co-workers, continued to exchange supposedly damning evidence against Morse with F. O. J. Smith and Henry O’Reilly.

Smith died in 1876, bankrupt and unlamented; O’Reilly died ten years later, an invalid. But Vail pressed on until her own death in 1894. Her accusations recent