Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [89]
It turned out to be a long hour. As the hoped-for invitation failed to arrive, Morse attributed it to the royal family’s preoccupation with the recent birth of the young prince, whom he saw (“he looked very much like any other baby”). But Louis-Philippe’s prestige and popularity had fallen, and he had been the target of several assassination attempts—one using a machine constructed of two dozen rifles that left fourteen people dead.
Morse’s prospects brightened when he was introduced to the celebrated astronomer-physicist Dominique François Jean Arago (1786–1853). Catalonian by birth, with dark curly hair and bushy sideburns, Arago was director of the Paris Observatory and permanent secretary of France’s elite national scientific society, the Académie des Sciences. Keenly interested in electromagnetic phenomena, he had been awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for his discovery that nonferrous metals could display magnetic properties. He invited Morse to exhibit his telegraph at the observatory and, impressed by what he saw, asked him to exhibit it again before the savans of the Académie.
The Academy met at the Institut de France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. Seven years before Morse had spent his time just across the river—at the Louvre, perched on a high stand to paint his Grand Gallery. For the telegraph demonstration, on September 10, he sent messages some four hundred feet in the alphabetic code of dots and lines. He used a battery recently invented by the British chemist John Daniell, capable of delivering a constant and powerful current—a major, permanent improvement to his system.
Morse wrote out some notes for Arago to use in serving as his spokesman and translator. Arago would explain to the academicians that the exhibition instrument was imperfect, deliberately made about as large as a little desk (“petit bureau”) to endure the knockabout of travel, although the actual instrument could be made only one-third the size. Morse’s notes included a short version of The Sully Story and points for Arago to stress in explaining the uniqueness of the system: it requires only one circuit, uses no magnetic needles, writes in permanent characters, needs no attendance at the place of delivery, and is relatively inexpensive. He also had Arago mention his yet unused receiving magnet, by which intelligence could be “written at any number of intermediate places between any two distant points, and simultaneously with its reception at the most distant points.”
Morse felt that his demonstration went off no less effectively before the French Académie than it had before the American Congress. And Arago’s verbal presentation of it was lucid and convincing, as Morse judged from the Academicians’ faces and surprised cries. “A buzz of admiration and approbation filled the whole hall,” he wrote later, “and the exclamations, ‘Extraordinaire!’ ‘Très bien!’ ‘Très admirable!’ I heard on all sides.” These were no ordinary mortals, of course, but “the most celebrated scientific men of the world.” The spectators included Gay-Lussac, famous for his work on the volume of gases, and the brilliant Baron Humboldt, who arose after the demonstration, Morse said, and taking his hand congratulated him before the entire Academy.
Full accounts of the event appeared in the Courier Français, the Moniteur, and other Paris newspapers, as well as the Annales de Chimie et de Physique and the Academy’s weekly bulletin, the Comptes Rendus, which went out not only to members but also to foreign scientific societies and libraries.