Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [83]
Returned to Speedwell, Morse conducted a private trial on January 6, using the vacant second floor of a barnlike factory building. Through the two miles of wire coiled around the room he sent a message suggested by Judge Vail: “A patient waiter is no loser.” Morse repeated the demonstration four days later, this time for hundreds of local people and some who had come from Newark for the event. He transmitted a quite full letter, which was deciphered with but a single minor error. “The success is complete,” he cheered, “the talk of all the people round.”
Speedwell factory building (Smithsonian Institution)
Two weeks later, accompanied by Vail, Morse tried some further experiments at New York University. For each performance he sent out engraved invitations requesting the presence of a select audience “to witness the operation of his ELECTRO MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH … previous to its leaving the City for Washington.” For the first time in public he attempted a transmission through the entire ten miles of wire. Disastrously, in three days of public tryouts the system repeatedly failed. As reportedly had happened at Speedwell when he faced difficulty, Morse fell ill (or “ill”). He recovered when still another attempted transmission worked. Better than that, he succeeded in the related test of using his markings to represent not numbers but letters. Surviving accounts do not make clear his means of doing so, beyond mentioning that he cast some sort of new type for the port-rule. But he learned that in this way he could transmit ten words per minute, twice as many as before. Among the messages he sent, one began, appropriately: “ATTENTION, THE UNIVERSE!”
Morse and Vail went on to Philadelphia, where Morse exhibited his ten-mile circuit before the Franklin Institute. Founded a decade earlier as the nation’s first organization “for the promotion of the mechanic arts,” the Institute sponsored lectures, published a distinguished journal, and looked into new inventions.
Morse demonstrated both his numerical method of marking, and his just-introduced method of marking letters that came to be known as Morse code. What seems to be the first mention in print of this famous dotdash alphabet appears in the Institute’s lengthy report on the demonstration:
Two systems of signals were exhibited, one representing numbers, the other letters. The numbers consist of nothing more than dots made on the paper with suitable spaces intervening. Thus … … …. would represent 325, and may either indicate this number itself, or a word in a dictionary prepared for the purpose to which this number is attached. The alphabetical signals are made up of combinations of dots and of lines of different lengths.
The still-controversial code has sometimes been attributed to Alfred Vail. On the contrary, Vail at this time told his father, significantly: “Professor Morse has invented a new plan of an alphabet, and has thrown aside the Dictionaries.” He also had reservations about Morse’s “new plan.” When improved it would outperform the numerical dictionary method, he thought. But the alphabetical signals required that the port-rule be cranked by machine, Morse’s hand being too unsteady. And Morse’s freshly cast type seemed to him imperfect. Even Vail’s criticisms, it deserves emphasis, indicate that the contriver of Morse code was Morse.
Following the Philadelphia exhibition, Vail boxed up the telegraph and forwarded it to Washington by railroad—a technology less than a decade old in the United States, and just beginning to flourish. Meanwhile the Franklin Institute sent a copy of its report to the Secretary