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By Root 1434 0

he said, “the manner, the place, and the moment when the thought of making an electric wire the means of communicating intelligence first came into my mind and was uttered.” He and Dr. Charles Jackson had just dined and were sitting across a table from each other. “We were conversing,” he said, “on the recent scientific discoveries in electro magnetism and the experiments of Ampere.” Another passenger asked whether a lengthy wire did not retard the passage of an electric current. Jackson replied No, that Benjamin Franklin had demonstrated long ago in London that electricity travels at once through any known length of wire. This, Morse said, triggered his crucial realization: “I then remarked … if the presence of electricity can be made visible in any desired part of the circuit I see no reason why intelligence might not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.”

By Morse’s account, the possibly world-changing idea took possession of his mind and kept him from sleeping. He tried to work out methods of regulating the current, drawing in his sketchbook what became the notched blanks of his port-rule. He pondered ways of using electricity to inscribe: the current might be made to puncture some paper by a spark or mark it by chemical decomposition. Regarding the second notion he consulted Jackson, who suggested that the current would leave a brown mark on paper stained with turmeric and treated with sulfate of soda. They agreed to experiment with the idea after reaching home.

Some at least of Morse’s account is confirmed by the pocket-size sketchbook he kept aboard the Sully. What survives is only a certified copy of a certified copy of the original. But it has an authentic look and feel of Morse’s return from his three years abroad, containing sketches of Havre and notes for his Capitol rotunda painting of Columbus. Quite as Morse maintained, he evidently was preoccupied while at sea with thoughts of a telegraph system. He sketched some of its main elements: a tube for burying conducting wires under the earth and tall poles for stringing them above ground; an electromagnet actuating an armature to move a stylus against a roll of paper. He also composed a newsworthy dispatch to be sent by number-word code, perhaps his first conception of what a telegraph message might be like: “War. Holland. Belgium. Alliance. France. England. against. Russia. Prussia. Austria.”

Of Morse’s work on the telegraph between his first inklings on the Sully in 1832 and the port-rule/register of 1837, only glimpses remain. Twenty years after the voyage, his brothers testified that they met him when the ship docked. As soon as they greeted him he announced that he had discovered a means of communicating intelligence by electricity. Moving in for several weeks with his brother Richard, he made a mold and used the parlor fireplace to cast blanks for the port-rule. In the process he spilled molten lead on a chair and rug, severely burning a finger.

Page from Morse’s Sully sketchbook (Smithsonian Institution)

Some of Morse’s colleagues and painting students at New York University later recalled seeing telegraph apparatus in his rooms in 1835–36, months after he moved into the tower. They remembered galvanic batteries, wire lying about the floor or suspended on the walls, the clockwork paper dispenser feeding out a white ribbon that became covered with Vs. “We grieved to see the sketch upon the canvas untouched,” one student added. “We longed to see him again calling into life events in our country’s history.”

To further secure his title to the invention, Morse began publicizing his telegraph through the press. Articles about his ongoing work soon appeared, headed “Morse’s Telegraph” and “Morse’s Magnetic Telegraph.” The Journal of Commerce commented that while American newspapers had been copying from papers abroad ecstatic notices of telegraphs in Europe, they seemed unaware that “the honor of the first discovery” belonged to America. “Prof. MORSE … some five years ago, on his passage home from France, conceived the idea of communicating