Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [87]
EIGHT
Traveling on a Snail’s Back
(1838–1839)
SEEKING A BRITISH patent first, Morse settled with Richard and F. O. J. Smith in Bloomsbury. London seemed jammed with people of every rank, pickpockets to princes, wholly given over to the upcoming coronation of the new English monarch, Queen Victoria. Soon after arriving Morse witnessed the public ceremonies, from seats temporarily set up near Westminster Abbey. The bell ringing and twenty-one-gun salutes, the shouts and hand clapping, the gold-laced silver-buttoned coachmen, struck him as brilliant, “the most gorgeous pageant that our times have witnessed.” But in London as before in Rome, Morse the republican came back at Morse the artist, tempering aesthetic pleasure with scorn: “Is it possible, I thought, that the English are children, to be duped by these gew-gaws?” He kept his hat off during the proceedings—not out of respect, but so that people behind him could see.
Morse experienced many more emotional swings in trying to get foreign patents. In England the process was expensive and complicated, normally taking six to eight weeks and an outlay of a few hundred pounds. Over four days in June, Morse went about to the offices of a half-dozen or more clerks, paying the required fees. Smith drafted a petition to the Crown describing Morse’s invention, and Morse’s intent to obtain patents in Scotland and Ireland as well. A hearing was set before the Attorney General, Sir John Campbell, at which the petition would be compared with the descriptions in any previously filed caveats.
Morse took his apparatus to the hearing in order to explain to the Attorney General the difference between his system and those of his competitors. But Campbell refused to even consider granting a patent. Instead, he confronted Morse with the February issue of the London Mechanic’s Magazine, where Morse’s method, he declared, had already been published. Because of the prior publication he told Morse he could not proceed.
Having expected his application to be approved, Morse was “certainly surprised.” To his knowledge nothing of his invention had appeared in print beyond the results—accounts of what his telegraph did, but with no description of its operation that would enable a mechanic to reproduce the apparatus. Returned to his lodgings he drew up an essay-length letter to Campbell, probably with Smith’s advice and help, defending his right to a British patent. He trod daintily, suggesting that some key points in his case had perhaps been misapprehended by the Attorney General because of “the imperfect manner in which I presented them.” He exhaustively described what he considered the unique, and still unpatented, features of his telegraph, and submitted drawings of them.
On the basis of his patiently detailed letter, Morse was granted a second hearing before Campbell, which he attended with Smith. He discovered, however, that the Attorney General had not read the letter. Carelessly turning over its pages, Campbell asked whether he had not applied for a patent in the United States. Morse said he had. As he recalled the exchange, Campbell snapped at him: “America was a large country and I ought to be satisfied with a patent there.” He protested that the point at issue was whether legal obstacles existed to granting him letters patent in England. Campbell shrugged him off. “He observed that he considered my invention as having been published and that he must therefore forbid me to proceed.” The Attorney General’s “most gross injustice,” Morse believed, had nothing to do with the merits of his case, but sprang from “national or other motives.” Either way, it killed any hope of profiting from his telegraph in Great Britain.
During his first interview with the Attorney General, Morse came face-to-face with one of his foreign competitors. In Campbell’s anteroom he encountered Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), whose telegraph had been written up in the Journal of the