Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [74]
Morse’s plans and hopes had a way of dissolving, however, and The Gem of the Republic no sooner took shape than it became unreal….
SEVEN
High Attribute of Ubiquity
(1837–1838)
THE STARTLING news evidently came to Morse through his brothers. On April 15, 1837, their Observer reprinted an item that had run a few days earlier in the Baltimore Patriot. It reported that two Frenchmen, named Gonon and Serval, were in the United States demonstrating a revolutionary system of long-distance communication. They claimed that their telegraph was capable of operating as fast as a person could write or even speak. Fast and far. A hundred-word dispatch might be sent from New York to New Orleans in half an hour.
The claims were amazing. The world measured communication-time in terms of transportation time, by how long it would take anything or anyone to get from here to there. Except by smoke signal, semaphore, and the like, sending words was the same as sending a package. Earlier in the century this meant that a letter went out no faster than ponies could gallop or sails could waft a schooner—or, by mid-century, no faster than coal-fed boilers could push steamships and railroad cars. The identity of communication with transportation had existed for millennia. News of Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 took as long to reach Washington as news of Alexander the Great’s victory at the Battle of Arbela took to reach his capital in 331 B.C. But Gonon and Serval redefined the possible. As the newspaper item exclaimed, “The imagination is overpowered in contemplating the consequences of such an achievement of human ingenuity.”
Morse felt overpowered, too, but for a different reason. He had in his rooms at New York University, he believed, the same system the Frenchmen were promoting in America. As far as he knew, no one but himself had even dreamed of such a device. Not only that. He had been quietly developing it for five years. He had allowed a few people at the University to see preliminary stages of his invention, and had sent a few correspondents a few oblique hints about it. But he seems to have kept only his brothers fully informed. As far as the world knew, since returning from Europe he had spent his time painting, teaching, or fighting immigration and Catholicism.
Through experiment Morse had often changed the design of his telegraph. The apparatus that existed around 1837 remained so crude that he was reluctant to have it seen, and perhaps ridiculed. It consisted of two main elements: a transmission device that he called the port-rule and a receiver called the register. The port-rule was activated by a printer’s composing stick (M)—about three feet long, made of wood, and grooved. Flat metal blanks could be set into the groove, each having from one to nine V-shaped notches. (An unnotched blank represented a space.) When the crank (L) was turned, the composing stick glided beneath the balanced lever overhead (O-O). A projecting tooth dropped into the valleys or rose to the peaks on the notched metal blanks. At the same time, the two-pointed copper prong at the other end of the lever dipped in and out of two thimble-size cups of mercury (J, K), which were connected to a battery (I). As the composing stick passed underneath, the seesawing lever opened and closed an electrical circuit, in a rhythm dictated by the notched blanks.
This circuit activated Morse’s register. He built the device into a wooden frame otherwise used for stretching canvas (X). A clockwork mechanism (D) slowly fed out a ribbon of paper over a drum (B). From the top of the frame, suspended above the paper, hung a pyramid-shaped pendulum (F) with a pencil at the lower end (g). Its movement was governed by a device set in the middle of the frame: an iron armature, and a bar of soft