Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [92]
Despite his many frustrations, Morse kept seeking new outlets for his invention. Smith drafted for him a letter to the famed international banker Baron Rothschild. It solicited the interest of “gentlemen of enterprise & intelligence,” promising that by Morse’s telegraph they could send messages in perfect secrecy. Morse also arranged with a wealthy Vermont capitalist then in Paris, Mellen Chamberlain, to market his system outside England and France. Smith drew up an agreement by which Chamberlain would bear the costs of travel and of procuring new instruments, and after deducting them from the proceeds return to Morse and his partners half the profits. Chamberlain meant to look for buyers or agents not only throughout Europe, but also in Asia and Africa.
Morse had intended to stay abroad only three months. But with some projects still alive and new ones developing he decided to linger. Meanwhile his brother Richard and F. O. J. Smith returned to the United States. Having taken the waters at Vichy and consulted physicians in Switzerland, Richard felt he had overcome his constant “sadness & dejection.” But the cures were short lived. Ever pessimistic—set on shutting out, as he realized, “every agreeable view of any object”—he began to think that whatever he had gained he would soon lose. He decided he must leave New York and withdraw from his partnership in the Observer.
Morse now saw Smith as a mixed blessing. He valued him for drafting letters that required legal expertise and for managing business deals. “I am not a business man,” he confessed, “and fear every movement which suggests itself.” But on other important matters he found Smith unreliable—especially in supplying the money the former congressman had promised to cover expenses in Paris. Jobless, his purse emptied by “a kind of perpetual diarrhoea,” he often complained to Smith that he had had to borrow: “I hope by an early answer you will relieve … the embarrassment I am in and have funds at my command sent me without delay.” To economize he built needed apparatus himself, spending hours in his room “like any mechanician.” In some degree he also blamed Smith for holding up the demonstration of his telegraph at court. “If I had the funds the King should have seen this long ago, and the government too have given me an answer.”
The stalled funds and bureaucratic delays often left Morse glum, his bright hopes in reach but never secured. He tried to “keep myself loose,” confining his expectations “at the lowest point, that is, at nothing.” But at times he slipped into one of his fits of “the blues,” certain that he was destined to be purse-poor forever, “never to realise even a competency.” He considered returning to America and moving permanently to the South, where he could resume his career in solitude as a portrait painter, “live secluded, without being burdensome to my friends.” But some encouraging chance for his telegraph always turned up to revive and strengthen his hopes. “My confidence increases every day in the certainty of the eventual adoption of this means of communication throughout the civilized world.” He reproved himself for mistrusting Providence, which in countless ways deserved his gratitude.
The black moods always returned, however. Or worse, when to the silence from the Palace and from Washington he