Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [78]
Suspecting that foreigners had stolen his ideas, Morse was astounded when his new publicity aroused charges of theft against himself—from an American. The accuser was Dr. Charles Jackson, his fellow passenger on the Sully. At the time of the voyage Jackson had been a twenty-eight-year-old physician with a Harvard M.D., returning from study of medicine and geology in Europe. Now he operated a private chemistry lab in Boston and served as state geologist of Maine. He wrote to Morse saying he rejoiced in the success of “our Electric Telegraph.” He had read notices of the device in the press, but he missed seeing himself mentioned: “I suppose that the reason why my name was not attached to the invention of the Electric Telegraph is simply that the editors did not know that the invention was our mutual discovery.”
The intensity of Morse’s reaction to this can be measured by the dozens of furious pages he wrote in reply. Going over in detail what seems every moment of his acquaintance with Jackson, he adopted a tone of gentlemanly respect for Jackson’s honor and fairness—broken, however, by poisonous accusations of delusional thinking, faulty memory, bad faith, and theft of intellectual property.
“I lose no time in endeavoring to disabuse your mind,” Morse began, “of an error into which it has fallen.” Rehearsing all their encounters aboard the Sully, he reminded Jackson of the after-dinner conversation that had inspired his crucial realization. Jackson had spoken of Franklin’s demonstration that electricity passes at once through any length of wire. This had been the moment of Morse’s epiphany: “I see no reason,” he had told the company, “why intelligence might not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.” Jackson considered himself a partner in the telegraph, it seemed, simply because they had agreed to experiment together with marking turmeric paper by electricity. In fact, Jackson had no conception of the port-rule and register Morse had devised. “All the machinery has been elaborated without a hint from you of any kind in the remotest degree. I am the sole inventor.”
“I have always entertained the highest opinion of your honour & fairness,” Jackson came back, “… should be very sorry to have any reason to change my opinion of your character.” He challenged point by point Morse’s version of what was becoming The Sully Story. The all-important suggestion for communicating intelligence by electricity had come not from Morse, he said, but from himself. During the after-dinner conversation he mentioned having seen a demonstration at the Sorbonne in which an electric spark traveled instantaneously around the lecture room four hundred times, an experiment anticipated by Franklin. Then one of the passengers, either Rives or Fisher, said “it would be well if we could send news in the same rapid manner.” At this, Morse asked, “ Why can’t we?” Jackson then explained how it could be done, using the spark to perforate ordinary paper or mark chemically treated paper—an experiment he had made himself. “I do claim to be the principal in the whole invention made on board the Sully,” Jackson concluded. “It arose wholly from my materials & was put together at your request by me.”
Too enraged to bother seeming polite, Morse replied with a threat of legal action. Certain that Jackson, an American, meant to steal his work, he again appealed to his acquaintances from the Sully, whose testimony he had sought against thieving Europeans. “I little thought when I made this request in order to prepare myself against foreign claimants,” he wrote, “that I should be under the necessity of again troubling