1856.] The First Words sent hy Telegraph. 77^ 



me explain. It would be hypocrisy in me to affect callousness, or indif- 

 ference to the good opinion of my fellows. Xo : I confess to a deep 

 feeling of gratification in receiving this evidence that the labors and 

 sacrifices of so many years of my life have not been thrown away upon 

 an impracticable, a chimerical dream. I have not, however, so super- 

 ficial a self-knowledge, as not to be awai-e, that there is something within 

 this bosom ever ready to kindle into a selfish pride at the least spark of 

 praise, a pride that would give utterance to the arrogant boast, ' Is not 

 this great Babylon that I have built, by the might of my power, and for 

 the honor of my majesty.' Who is it that commands the lightnings to 

 go, and they go? Who gave the telegraph to the world ? Permit me 

 to state an incident in the early history of the telegraph, which is 

 directly pertinent to the answer to these two questions. At two sessions 

 of the Congress of the United States, my petition for the pecuniary aid 

 of the government to construct the experimental line of telegraph from 

 Washington to Baltimore, to test its practicability and utility, dragged 

 its slow length along, and at the close of the session of 1842 and 1843, 

 threatened a result as inauspicious as the previous session of 1837 and 

 1838. I need not more than allude to the fact, that in the previous 

 session of 1837, I had expended all the pecuniary means I possessed, to 

 sustain myself at Washington, while urging upon the attention of Con- 

 gress, then untried, this then generally esteemed visionary enterprise of 

 electric telegraph. Years were required to put myself again in a pecu- 

 niary condition to appear before Congress with my invention, and now I 

 saw the last day of another entire session just about to close, and with 

 it the prospect of still another year's delay. My bill had, indeed, passed 

 the House. It was on the calendar of the Senate, but the evening of the 

 last day had commenced, with more than one hundred bills to be con- 

 sidered and passed upon before mine should be reached. Wearied with 

 the anxiety of suspense, I consulted with one of my senatorial friends ; 

 he thought the chance of reaching it so small, that he advised me to con- 

 sider it as lost. In a state of mind I must leave you to imagine, I 

 returned to my lodgixigs to make my preparations for returning home the 

 next day. My funds were reduced to the fraction of a dollar. In the 

 morning, c;s I was about to sit down to breakfast, the servant announced 

 that a young lady desired to see me in the parlor. It was the daughter 

 of my excellent friend and college class-mate, the Commissioner of 

 Patents. She called, she said, by her father's permission, and in the 

 exuberance of her own joy, to announce to me the passaw of the tele- 

 graph bill, at midnght, but the moment before the Senate's adjournment. 

 T;iis ivas the turning point of the telegraph invention in America. As 



