Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [97]
The heady appeals and flattery from on high produced no more action, however, than the rest of Morse’s dealings with the British and French, which had crept along or gone nowhere. Elgin promised him an introduction to the influential former Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Brougham. But when Morse applied to see Brougham the answer was a formal note of compliments and regrets. His Lordship was engaged at the House every day until dinner, and could allow him only a few minutes some morning before ten.
Morse sailed back to the United States on March 23 aboard the Great Western, one of the new screw-propelled iron steamships that were all but eliminating the centuries-old tedium and danger of ocean travel, capable of crossing the Atlantic in only two weeks. He made it to New York in three, despite stormy weather, anxious to hear from the Czar and move on to St. Petersburg.
NINE
Beware of Tricks
(1839—1842)
HAVING BEEN gone eleven months instead of the intended three, Morse found his affairs at home even more chaotic than he expected. In his absence the University had dismissed seven professors and reduced student enrollment from a hundred or so to forty. His own professorship had become “merely nominal.” Dr. Charles Jackson was still attacking him. Congress had done nothing toward financing a long-distance trial of his telegraph. And he had arrived broke—owing for rent, borrowing for meals, “not even a farthing in my pocket.”
Morse saw his one hope of relief in selling his telegraph to the Russian government. As he awaited the promised message from Baron Meyendorff, announcing the Czar’s decision, he tried to work out problems in his apparatus, to have it in top condition for presentation in St. Petersburg. Leonard Gale, his partner and consultant on scientific questions, was away in New Orleans. So he sought advice from Joseph Henry (1797?–1878), the formidable Professor of Natural Philosophy at Princeton. Son of an alcoholic day-laborer who died in a seizure of d.t.’s, Henry had made himself a world-class investigator of electricity, and the only American physicist with an international reputation.
Morse wrote Henry a deferential letter asking to meet with him at Princeton. He would come strictly as a learner, he said, but in advance he raised a general question: had Henry’s research and experiment uncovered anything that seemed to make the Morse system impracticable? Henry wrote back encouragingly. He said he knew of nothing that might prevent the success of Morse’s mode of telegraphy: “on the contrary I believe that science is now ripe for this application and that there are no difficulties in the way but such as ingenuity and enterprise may obviate.” One such issue, he said, was the length of wire between stations. If the length were great, something would have to be done to develop sufficient power at the far end. Meanwhile he invited Morse to Princeton.
Joseph Henry (Chicago Historical Society)
Morse visited Henry for a few days in May. Blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, Henry himself had recently returned from a year’s leave in Europe, where he met Wheatstone and Michael Faraday, and sat in on a meeting of the Académie des Sciences. (A reader of the Romantic poets, he also heard Wordsworth lecture on poetry.) Morse wrote out several key questions to ask Henry. For one, Would a succession of magnets introduced into the circuit diminish the magnetism in each? Here he obviously had in mind his relay, although he does not seem to have mentioned the invention during his visit.
Henry freely gave his opinions on Morse’s telegraph and Morse generally thought him amiable—an opinion he would drastically revise. They evidently discussed unrelated scientific topics as well, for Morse afterward sent him comments on the phenomenon of prismatic arches