Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [76]
Such reports described methods and devices akin to what Morse had produced himself. He received the news with not only pained disbelief but also suspicion. “There is not a thought in any of the foreign journals relative to the Telegraph,” he said, “which I had not expressed nearly 5 years ago.” Knowing well enough how Europe and England feared America’s example and wished to curb its growing power, he worried that before he could perfect his own apparatus the innovations it embodied would be stolen from him, “that other nations will take the hint and rob me both of the credit and the profit.”
Morse set to work establishing himself as the inventor of the electric telegraph. First he tried to verify the date of his discovery. When and how had news of his invention leaked out? Word of mouth travels fast: “a hint flies from mind to mind and is soon past all tracing back to the original suggester.” He traced the progress of his own hints back to his return voyage from France in October 1832, aboard the ship Sully. It was then and there that the idea of an electric telegraph first occurred to him, and he had divulged it. “It is certainly by no means improbable,” he thought, “that the excitement on the subject in England has its origin from my giving the details of the plan of my telegraph to some of the Englishmen or other fellow passengers on board the ship.”
To confirm his suspicions and establish his originality, Morse prepared a circular letter addressed to the captain of the Sully and four passengers:
There is to be a contest, it seems, for priority of invention of this Electric Telegraph between England, France, Germany and this country. I claim for myself and consequently for America priority over all other countries in the invention of a mode of communicating intelligence by electricity.
His object in writing, he said, was to ask whether his shipmates recalled his speaking about an electric telegraph during the voyage five years ago. If so, he asked them to fully state what they recalled. He also asked the captain, William Pell, to answer a more specific question: had Pell mentioned the telegraph to others after the voyage? The ship had carried twenty-six passengers, mostly Americans, plus seven or eight French farmers in steerage, presumably immigrants. In addition to Captain Pell, Morse addressed his letter collectively to fellow-passengers Francis J. Fisher, a Philadelphia lawyer; William Rives, the American minister to France; Charles C. Palmer; and the Boston physician-geologist Dr. Charles Jackson.
Morse may not have sent Jackson a copy of the letter—for reasons to be explained—and Palmer seems to have left the United States. But his other hoped-for defenders replied quickly, and their accounts of the voyage bore out his most significant assertion. “I have a distinct remembrance,” Captain Pell wrote, “of your suggesting as a thought newly occurred to you, the possibility of a telegraphic communication being effected by electric wires.” The passengers agreed, with slight variation. “You spoke of a single wire,” Fisher wrote, “and letters or signs were to be indicated by a quick succession of strokes or shocks.”
Morse’s respondents also agreed that his telegraph generated discussion, among other things of how to protect the wire conductor when strung across rivers. Morse had solved the problems proposed to him, Rives recalled, with “great promptitude & confidence.” Captain Pell believed that the give-and-take helped Morse refine his vague original idea, so by the end of the trip he had conceived a workable instrument. “I sincerely trust,” Pell added, “that circumstances may not deprive you of the reward due to the invention, which, whatever may be its source in Europe, is with you I am convinced original.” He mentioned, however, that since the voyage he had indeed spread the word and told others of Morse’s telegraph.
Morse’s own recollections of his discoveries aboard the Sully were minutely particular. He clearly remembered,