Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [95]
Toward the end of February Morse received an exciting proposal from a surprising direction. He had moved into new quarters, 5 rue Neuve des Mathurins. To save money he shared the space with a French-speaking Protestant minister from Boston, Edward Kirk. With Kirk acting as translator, he demonstrated his telegraph at home every Tuesday afternoon. He opened the levee to Paris scientific and government circles, but many other Europeans crowded in—Counts and Lords, as he carefully noted, Dukes and Duchesses, the Infante of Spain. All exclaimed over his system. He recorded the broken-English praise from one bigwig: “Are you not glorious, sair, to be the author of this wonderful discovery?”
The exciting proposal came from another of his enthusiastic distinguished guests—a Baron Meyendorff, agent of Czar Nicholas I of Russia. Meyendorff said he would immediately advise his government to establish a twenty-mile line of Morse telegraphs from St. Petersburg, laid underground. His right-hand man, an experienced scientist named Amyot, could experiment with Morse to ascertain the effects of temperature on the conductibility of long lengths of buried wire. The Czar had 80,000 men at his command, Meyendorff pointed out, so the trench for interring the circuit could be dug in only a week. Over several further meetings, he and Morse discussed the possibility of an eight-hundred-mile line to Warsaw.
Meyendorff’s Czar was of course the same autocratic Nicholas I who eight years earlier had crushed the Polish uprising and absorbed Poland into the Russian empire. Outraged, Morse had joined the American Polish Committee in Paris and written sympathetic newspaper articles describing the woeful situation of Polish exiles. But with the chance of Morse lines serving the great Russian capital, outrage made room for buttering up. Czar Nicholas, he told Meyendorff, was “well known to be both just and liberal.”
Morse, Meyendorff, and Amyot worked out detailed financial arrangements and a schedule. The Russian government would pay all expenses, including an advance of 4000 francs to Morse and a per diem allowance from the time he embarked for Russia. The contract was dispatched by courier to St. Petersburg for approval by Nicholas. Aware that Morse was planning to return home, Meyendorff promised to send him the Czar’s reply through the Russian Ambassador to the United States, between May 10 and 15. Morse could leave from New York around June 1, be in Paris a month later, and reach St. Petersburg by July 15.
Morse immediately booked return passage to America for March 23, a month hence. He quickly wrote to Smith, asking his partner to have six or eight new telegraphs made that he could take to Russia, embodying all the recent improvements: “our whole energies must be directed to having this first adoption of our System, a successful one; all hands must go to work.”
Morse’s last two weeks abroad were intense. Since the beginning of the year his telegraph had been competing for public notice with another invention, by the stage designer Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789–1851). Daguerre operated a celebrated diorama in Paris, huge transparent paintings brought alive with props and lighting effects, such as a view of Mont Blanc, changing from night to day, an Alp horn sounding.
After many years’ labor, Daguerre and his now-deceased partner, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, had discovered a chemical process that could fix an image in the camera obscura (literally, “dark room”). The camera was a light-tight box commonly used as an aid to drawing. A convex lens at one end projected an image of the outside world onto a screen at the other end. An artist could peer into the box and draw from the image. When painting in New Haven around 1821,