Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [90]
Some of the journalists observed that questions of priority, Europe vs. America, were at the moment being debated fiercely (“avec acharnement”). They drew up genealogies of the telegraph, charting a history of active European experiment and invention over the last thirty years. The names and events were becoming familiar to Morse, although he had known nothing of them when he began. They included Samuel T. Sömmering, president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, who in 1809 demonstrated a thirty-five-wire telegraph driven by the electrolytic decomposition of water; the Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted, who initiated the study of electromagnetism by discovering, in 1819, that a wire carrying a current deflects a compass needle; André Marie Ampère, a French physicist who saw the possibility of using Oersted’s deflected needles to transmit alphabetic signals (an idea he published but did not pursue); Baron Pavel L. Schilling, one of Sömmering’s assistants, a Russian who developed a prototype of the needle telegraph, perhaps as early as 1825; and the Germans Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber, who in 1833 built the first telegraph to come into practical use, an electromagnetic needle device with a two-wire circuit. The Courier Français commented that “in reality there does not yet exist an inventor of the telegraph. The Inventor will be the first constructor who shall make it operate upon a very extended line.”
Morse enjoyed the publicity and enthusiasm. He noted that the Théâtre des Variétés was presenting a skit in which the characters conversed by telegraph over hundreds of miles. The Paris town talk not only established his name in France, but also put him ahead of his British and German rivals. Cooke and Wheatstone had obtained a French brevet, but Morse learned that his own telegraph was preferred, “pronounced far superior in simplicity and practicability.” Steinheil’s two-needle telegraph was shown in Paris, and Morse was also pleased to note that because of its complexity “mine is considered … having a decided advantage.” The news got back to America, where the Washington National Intelligencer, for one, reported that their countryman had the Englishmen and German beat: “It is said … to be very manifest that our Yankee Professor is ahead of them all in the essential requisites of such an invention.”
The acclaim brought Morse a new chance to realize his ultimate hope of demonstrating his telegraph to the King. Following the Academy exhibition, he was visited by Alphonse Foy, administrator of the current network of semaphores. Foy told him that the government now meant to test the practicability of a nationwide electric telegraph. He said he would recommend Morse’s apparatus: “I have examined carefully the system of Steinheil, of Wheatstone, and many others, French and German, and … yours is the best.”
Foy’s endorsement would go to the influential Minister of the Interior, Count Marthe de Montalivet, who was personally close to Louis-Philippe. Hoping to reinforce his case, Morse got a letter of introduction to Montalivet from General Lewis Cass, the American minister to France. Drafted by F. O. J. Smith, it explained that Morse wished to bring before the government a method of telegraphy that was simple, cheap, fast, and accurate, capable of being extended to every point in the country. If the government preferred, he could begin by building an experimental line connecting the royal palaces alone.
Having gained influential support, Morse awaited an interview with Count Montalivet, leading to a presentation before Louis-Philippe. But Montalivet’s secretary put