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By Root 1606 0

Franklin Institute in May 1837. At the time, Morse was laboring to send messages through a circuit of 1700 feet; Wheatstone was transmitting across nineteen miles. Now in his mid-thirties, Wheatstone looked “quite young,” Morse thought, an impression that Wheatstone’s small features and painful shyness also left on others. Shortsighted and fast-talking, too, he had been born into a family of musical-instrument makers. He himself later invented the concertina—as well as a solar clock for arctic expeditions, an effective typewriter, and the rheostat. Interested also in pure scientific research, he worked with Michael Faraday on thermoelectricity and was elected to the Royal Society. Currently he taught at King’s College, London, as Professor of Experimental Philosophy.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (The Science Museum, London)

Wheatstone invited Morse to visit him at the College and inspect his telegraph. Together with William Fothergill Cooke (1806–1879), a maker of anatomical wax models, he had developed a receiving apparatus that indicated letters by deflecting five needles in various ways on a diamond-shaped plate. For example, two counterclockwise deflections stood for A, one counterclockwise and three clockwise deflections stood for T. Wheatstone and Cooke had been granted a patent a year before—the first English patent for an electrical telegraph.

Morse found Wheatstone likable and intelligent, “a most liberal generous hearted man…. decidedly a man of uncommon genius.” He admired the clever and handsomely built telegraph, too, but thought it overly complex. It required five wire conductors between transmitter and receiver, and the signals were evanescent: the position of the needles on the dial had to be observed on the instant or be lost for ever. By comparison, his own telegraph used only one wire and imprinted its messages permanently. Except that both devices sent an electrical current over a circuit, Morse saw, the two systems had nothing in common. And a signaling telegraph such as Cooke-Wheatstone’s was intrinsically slower and less accurate than his recording telegraph.

During his seven weeks in London, Morse also learned something about two other rivals—the London surgeon Edward Davy and, especially, Karl Steinheil, a professor of mathematics and physics in Munich. He saw Davy’s six-wire telegraph in operation, and heard that the surgeon was attempting to add a recording device. It would produce a “bungling imitation” of his original zigzagging Vs, he thought, illustrations of which Davy must have seen in some newspaper. Steinheil’s telegraph represented a greater challenge. Morse did not see the instrument, but it was described to him as actuating two needles, which carried small reservoirs of ink and could mark a paper with lines resembling the dotdash code. It used a single circuit, like his own telegraph. Indeed he was told that Steinheil had copied this improvement from him. Later he learned that in reality Steinheil used two circuits.

Before coming to London, Morse had known about European telegraphs only through accounts in the press. His personal investigation of them enabled him for the first time to define the uniqueness of his own system, the ground on which his claim of originality could solidly stand. “My time has not been lost,” he wrote, “for I have ascertained with certainty that the Telegraph of a single circuit and a recording apparatus, is mine.”

Denied a British patent, Morse left for France, “not sanguine,” he said, “as to any favorable pecuniary result.” He took rooms on the rue de Rivoli, pleasantly overlooking the Tuileries gardens. The city had been turbulent during his visit six years before, following the July revolution. In the meantime his esteemed friend Lafayette had died, and with growing prosperity, new roads, the opening of the Arc de Triomphe, and at least a facade of parliamentary government, organized resistance and street rioting seemed things of the past.

Morse quickly obtained the French equivalent of a patent, a brevet d’invention. Since the semaphoric French