Made In America - Bill Bryson [60]
Consider the fate of poor Elias Howe, a young Boston native who in 1846 produced the first workable sewing-machine. The trouble was that no one wanted it. Depressed by his failure, Howe suffered a nervous breakdown and fled to England, where he hoped his ingenious invention might be given a more congenial reception. It was not. After two years of tramping the streets, he was so destitute that he had to work his passage home on a merchant ship. Arriving penniless in Boston he discovered that in his absence one Isaac Singer had stolen his patent, set up a sewing-machine factory and was making money hand over fist. Howe took Singer to court, where it became apparent that Singer had not a leg to stand on but was making so much money from Howe’s invention that he could afford to hire the sharpest lawyers. After a protracted fight, Singer was compelled to pay Howe a decent royalty on every machine built. (Having secured his fortune, Howe promptly enlisted in the Union Army as a common foot-soldier; it was an age of eccentrics as well as inventors.) None the less, it is Singer’s name, not Howe’s, that is indelibly associated in the popular mind with the sewing-machine.23
Equally unlucky was J. Murray Spangler, who invented the vacuum cleaner – or electric suction sweeper as he called it – at the turn of the century in New Berlin, Ohio. Unable to make a success of it, he turned for advice to W. H. Hoover, a local leather-goods maker who knew nothing about electrical appliances but did recognize a business opportunity when it fell in his lap. Before long there were Hoover factories all over the world, Hoover was credited with a great invention he had nothing to do with, the British were turning his name into a verb, and J. Murray Spangler was forgotten.
But perhaps the greatest historical snub was that meted out to Professor Joseph Henry of Princeton, who in 1831 invented the telegraph. The word itself had been coined thirty-seven years earlier by a Frenchman named Claude Chappe, for a kind of semaphore system employed during the French Revolution, and by 1802 was being employed to describe long-distance messages of all types. Henry not only had the idea of transmitting messages as coded electrical impulses via wires, but worked out all the essentials that would be necessary to make such a system feasible, but for some reason he never bothered to perfect, or more crucially patent, the process.
That fell to a talented, well-connected, but generally unattractive fellow from Charlestown, Massachusetts, named Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Morse – Finley to family and friends – would have been a man of distinction even if he had never perfected the telegraph. The scion of a leading New England clan (his grandfather had been president of Princeton), he was an accomplished artist, a member of Britain’s Royal Academy, a professor of fine arts at New York University, a dedicated dabbler in the creative sciences, and a would-be politician of distinctly reactionary bent (he ran twice for mayor of New York on a virulently anti-Catholic ticket and believed, among other things, that slavery was not just a good thing but divinely inspired). His consuming passion, however, was the idea of transmitting messages along wires, to the extent that he abandoned his career and spent five desperately impoverished years perfecting the telegraph and lobbying Congress for funding. Finally, in 1842, Congress – proving that it is seldom more than half smart – appropriated $30,000 for Morse’s experiments and $30,000 to be spent on the equally exciting new science of mesmerism.
With his share of the funds, Morse strung a wire between Washington and Baltimore and on 11 May 1844 sent the first telegraphic message (it would not be called a telegram for another twelve years). Every schoolchild knows that this first message was ‘What