Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [98]
Morse expected to hear from Baron Meyendorff between May 10 and 15, but no answer came. For once he welcomed the delay. He wanted time to test his apparatus at home before embarking, “to have every thing in prime order, so as to surprise the czar.” He decided to build two new instruments, still further improved. Among other things, he overhauled the port-rule so that the metal blanks no longer had to be laboriously set by hand and cranked under the lever. Instead, he devised a small keyboard with a key for each letter, something like a miniature piano. Pressing the key closed the circuit and produced on the tape dots and dashes representing that letter. The new port-rule, he felt, overcame the one advantage of Wheatstone’s system to his own, that of showing a letter instantly, without having to set it up in type.
While streamlining his apparatus, Morse wrote again to Baron Meyendorff. But he received no news about the thinking in St. Petersburg. The Secretary of the Russian legation called on him in July to say that a message was expected by steamship. But none arrived: “the state of suspense,” he told Meyendorff, “is becoming exceedingly painful as well as disastrous to me in forming my plans for the future.”
The news finally arrived in August, and came from Amyot, the Baron’s assistant. No, the Czar had decided, no telegraph. It troubled him, Amyot explained, that electrical communication might easily be interrupted by acts of malevolence. Morse had discussed such concerns with Meyendorff while still in Paris, and refuted them to the Baron’s satisfaction. No matter. As Amyot dismally concluded, “The despotic countries and the free countries, my dear M. Morse, have therefore equally rejected your setting up a telegraph system.” Morse hoped to get from Meyendorff a fuller account of the Czar’s reasons, “ if Emperors give reasons.” He comforted himself by recalling that leading scientists at home and abroad believed that his invention would be established all over the world. But the defeat was hard to take: “I cannot believe that all my time and anxiety, and risk, and labors are to end in nothing.”
Prospects looked darker still when Morse learned, at around the same time, the fate of Mellen Chamberlain—the agent who had exhibited his telegraph to the Greek royal family and had been about to take it to Asia Minor and Egypt. During a pleasure-boat excursion on the Danube, Chamberlain and his party of nine drowned. No one knew what if anything he had managed to accomplish in Constantinople or in Alexandria.
Morse decided to take a break: “Perhaps it is the part of wisdom to let the matter rest and watch for an opportunity, when times look better.” Early in the fall, burdened by debt, he began making himself into a full-time photographer.
Morse had kept in touch with Louis Daguerre, whose process had been receiving excited coverage in the American press, headlined a “Remarkable Invention,” an “Extraordinary Chemical and Optical Discovery.” He invited Daguerre to exhibit in the United States and proposed him for honorary membership in the N.A.D.—to which Daguerre was unanimously elected, with “wild enthusiasm.” Morse also championed Daguerre against the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, a member of the Royal Society who had independently invented a rival method using photosensitive paper instead of metal plates. “Should any attempts be made here to give to any other than yourself the honor of this discovery,” he wrote to Daguerre, “my pen is ever ready in your defense.”
Morse set to work by acquiring a copy of Daguerre’s seventy-five-page manual, Historique et Description des Procédés du Daguerréotype, which described the new process step by step, with diagrams of the necessary equipment. Later in life he claimed to have bought the first copy of Daguerre’s manual to reach America, and to have been the first American to make a photograph—claims now either