Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [82]
With the agreement signed, and the Vail family sending checks, Morse and his team got to work in earnest overhauling the telegraph for demonstration in Washington. He and Gale stayed at the University, Vail returned to the Speedwell Iron Works, in Morristown, New Jersey. The surviving documents provide only sketchy information about the time and exact nature of their various improvements. But now and over the following months Vail streamlined the register. He got rid of the canvas stretcher and pendulum, and reinstalled the recording apparatus on and within a flat box. The register became a horizontal, not a vertical, device, no longer standing up but lying down. At the same time he simplified the operation of the electromagnet and of the clockwork that moved the paper.
Meanwhile Morse and Gale prepared the conducting wire, no easy task. Plans called for showing Congress an instrument that could operate over ten miles—commonly the distance between the stations of optical telegraphs. Frustratingly, the wire arrived slowly in batches from its Connecticut manufacturer and proved to be made of inferior copper. The brittleness made it difficult for Morse and Gale to solder the segments together. Their efforts were further delayed in awaiting the arrival of heavy storage reels from Speedwell. And the entire ten miles of wire had to be wound in cotton for insulation. By November, Gale had a strong current working through the whole length—a triumph—but the current burned the mercury in the small cups. A so-called Cruikshank’s battery had to be built to overcome the problem: a tar-coated mahogany trough filled with acid, holding sixty pairs of large zinc-copper plates.
At the same time, Morse labored over the giant dictionary, “a most tedious, never ending work,” he said. “I am up early & late, yet its progress is slow.” He had in mind a compendium of 30,000 handwritten words, but whether he achieved this length is uncertain. He completed two copies late in October, on oversize pages about two feet square. To judge from his later dictionaries, he divided each page into five columns, fifty words per column, in alphabetical order and several grammatical forms. The number 36, for example, meant “abash,” 37 “abashed,” 38 “abashing,” 39 “abate,” and so on. However grueling the effort, Morse glowed over the result. Operators could now transmit, by numbers alone, “any intelligence whatever in the fullest manner.”
Over the first three months of the new year, Morse unveiled his refurbished telegraph in a series of public exhibitions, climaxed by his presentation to Congress. Vail or someone in his family suggested that he first try out the apparatus at Speedwell, about thirty-five miles from New York City. Morse and Gale stripped from one of the reels, and sent on to New Jersey, two miles of wire—a length sufficient to prove the efficiency of the remodeled telegraph over substantial distances.
Set in rolling hills along the Whippany River, the Vails’ foundry and machine shop converted iron bars into screws for ships and crankshafts for railroad cars, its clanging forge room a world of burning cedar and white-hot fagots. In addition to Vail and his brother George, the place was worked by several slaves and indentured servants, sometimes personally whipped by a stout old gentleman in Quaker garb—Alfred’s father, Stephen Vail, a skilled mechanic who was also a lay judge of the Court of Common Pleas.
Morse had visited the ironworks once before to test