Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [80]
Gale knew how to do that. He saw that Morse’s telegraph used a one-cup galvanic battery—that is, a pair of zinc and copper plates immersed in a cup of acid. Such a battery generated low voltage, incapable of producing a current over a long distance, which demanded a battery of many cups. Gale had one, a so-called intensity battery of forty cups that he substituted for Morse’s single cup. Gale also saw that Morse had wound the electromagnet loosely, with a few turns of wire. Gale had read a scientific paper published in 1831 by Professor Joseph Henry of Princeton, the pre-eminent American physicist, describing how the power of an electromagnet could be greatly increased by winding it tightly in hundreds of turns of wire. No physicist himself, Morse expressed “great surprise” at the idea, Gale said. But on Gale’s advice he rewound the magnet, girdling it a hundred times or more.
With the powerful new battery and magnet, Morse soon had his telegraph operating not through 40 feet but through 200 and shortly after through 1000. On September 2, 1837, he gave his first public exhibition of the apparatus, at New York University. He set up a circuit of 1700 feet, one-third of a mile. The wire stretched many times back and forth across a long room that served as Gale’s lecture hall and housed the University’s mineralogy collection. The spectators included a Fellow of the Royal Society, Charles Daubeny, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford. Morse reported the success of his presentation in the Journal of Commerce, remarking that it showed the practicability of his telegraph, and its superior simplicity “over any of those proposed by the Professors in Europe.”
Increasingly confident and ambitious, Morse wrote three weeks later to the Secretary of the Treasury, Levi Woodbury. At the direction of Congress, Woodbury had issued a government request for information and advice about the possibility of erecting a telegraph in the United States—that is, a network of semaphore towers such as existed in France. Morse’s response to Woodbury reconceived the whole project. Optical telegraphs, he said, were inaccurate, slow, and useless at night or in fog. Instead, he had invented a new mode of telegraphic communication that was precise, nearly instantaneous, and operable day or night in any kind of weather.
Morse described in detail his port-rule-register-dictionary. But he emphasized that the interest of Congress in a nationwide telegraph system inspired him to now think beyond it. He suggested that miles of wire might be interred in iron tubes or strung above ground on stout spars, thirty feet high, fifteen to the mile. He told Woodbury that he was now experimenting with very long distances, along with Professor Gale, “a gentleman of great science, and to whose assistance … I am greatly indebted.” He promised to send their results to the Secretary, and demonstrate his invention in Washington before the new year. If the government wished to use it he was ready to make any sacrifice of time and energy to help create a national system, “which may justly be called the American telegraph.”
Morse’s unusual response impressed Woodbury. The Secretary submitted to Congress seventeen of the replies he received. All but one, he explained, concerned semaphores, the single, striking novelty being Morse’s. Woodbury soon passed along to the House the progress reports Morse had promised. By late November they contained news that Morse and Gale had transmitted a message through a circuit of ten miles—“and we have now no doubt of … effecting a similar result at any distance.” At this point Morse told Woodbury that he wished to delay his appearance in Washington in order to refine his crude hardware and present for the government’s evaluation “as perfect an instrument as possible.”
Morse knew no more of toolmaking, however, than of electrical science. Having turned