Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [75]
Morse’s original telegraph apparatus (ca. 1836) (Samuel I. Prime, The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, LL.D. [1875])
Reproduction of Morse’s original port-rule (Smithsonian Institution)
In operation, then, as the composing stick passed beneath the seesawing lever, opening and closing the circuit, the register reproduced in pencil on its paper ribbon the pattern of the V-shaped notches cut into the metal blanks. The Vs signified numbers: VVVVVV represented 6, for example, VV VVV 23. To decode the message the recipient looked up the word numbered 6 and the word numbered 23 in a dictionary expressly compiled for the purpose.
However crude, Morse’s telegraph was accurate and, once the type was set, fast. That it might not be unique, however, had never occurred to him. To counter the boasts of Gonon and Serval, he and Sidney immediately made his five-year-long effort known to the public. In reprinting the Baltimore article about the French invention, Sidney informed readers of the Observer that rapid communication over long distances was stale news. The feat had been suggested to him “several years since,” he said, using an electrical battery and fine wires. Surely to avoid any hint of Morse family self-interest, he identified the inventor only as “a gentleman of our acquaintance.” Instead, he had his brother’s identity revealed in a companion article in the Journal of Commerce: “The Gentleman alluded to by the editor of the New York Observer, as the inventor of the Electric Telegraph, is Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the President of the National Academy of Design.”
Whatever dismay Morse felt in learning about Gonon and Serval was in one sense excessive and in another not enough. The system of the two self-styled “Professors of Graphy” was not an electrical telegraph at all, but an alleged improvement on the optical telegraph, a semaphore. France had a working system of such semaphores, windmill-like towers of adjustable arms and flaps, built about six miles apart. Signal operators used ropes and pulleys to position the arms according to a code. Messages were read by telescope from station to station and passed on. The system spanned all of France, extending into Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It was to this complex visual semaphore that, in 1794, the word “telegraph” was first applied.
Chappe semaphore (Musée de la Poste, Paris)
Morse soon learned, however, that although he had supposed himself to be the first person who ever put the words “electric” and “telegraph” together, scientists of several countries had been experimenting with electrical signaling systems for about twenty years. And in the fall of 1837 the American press began reporting a sudden surge in the production of such devices abroad, and of interest in them. “Scarcely a journal arrives from Europe which does not contain some notice of the Electric Telegraph,” the Journal of Commerce said, “which now seems to have excited the attention of the scientific world as the wonder of the age.”
Morse clipped and preserved articles depressingly headed “ELECTRIC WIRE TELEGRAPHS,” “NEW AND BEAUTIFUL INVENTION.” He read that in Scotland a William Alexander proposed laying insulated copper wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, under the turnpike from London to Edinburgh. In Munich a Professor Steinheil was stringing iron wires between the cathedral and the observatory of Bogenhausen; he conjectured that Lisbon could communicate to St. Petersburg in two seconds. In London an “eminent scientific gentleman” was perfecting a device to send an electric current through five wires that activate needles, whose positions on a dial denote letters