PROCEEDINGS OF THE REGENTS. 115 



Cliilton, of New York, informed me that he had referred Mr. Morse 

 to them previous to his experiments in the New York University. I 

 was therefore much surprised on the publication, in 1845, of a work 

 purporting to give a history of the telegraph, and of the principles on 

 which it was founded, by Mr. Vail, then principal assistant of Mr. 

 Morse, and one of the proprietors of his patent, to find all my 

 published researches relating to the telegraph passed over with little 

 more than the remark that Dr. Moll and myself had made large 

 electro-magnetic magnets. Presuming that this publication was 

 authorized by Mr. Morse and the proprietors of the telegraph, I com- 

 plained to some of his friends of the injustice, and after his return 

 trom Europe, (for he was absent at the time the book was issued,) I 

 received a letter, copied and signed by Mr. Vail, but written by Mr. 

 Morse, as the latter afterwards informed me, excusing the publication, 

 on the ground that he (Mr. Vail) was ignorant of what I had done, 

 and asking me for an account of my researches. This letter was 

 addressed to me after the book had been stereotyped and widely 

 circulated. It has been translated into French, and, I believe, 

 published in Paris. To the letter I did not think fit to make 

 any reply. I afterwards received a letter from Mr. Morse, in his 

 own name, on the same subject, to which I gave a verbal reply in 

 January, 1847, in Washington. In this interview Mr. Morse acknow- 

 ledged that injustice had been done me, but said that proper repara- 

 tion would be made. Another issue of the same work was made, 

 b<>aring date 1847, in which there is no change in the statement 

 relative to my researches. 



About the beginning of 1848 Mr. Walker, of the Coast Survey, in 

 a report on the application of the telegraph to the determination of 

 differences of longitude, alluded to my researches. A copy of this 

 was sent to Mr. Morse, which led to an interview between Mr. Walker, 

 Professor Gale, Mr. Morse, and myself. At this meeting, which took 

 place at my office in Washington, Mr. Morse stated that he had not 

 known until reading my paper in January, 1847, that I had two years 

 before his first conception in 1832, settled the point of practicability 

 of the telegraph, and shown how mechanical effects could be produced 

 at a distance, both in the deflection of a needle and in the action of an 

 electro-magnet; that he did not know, at the time of his experiments 

 in 1837 that there had been any doubts of the action of a current at 

 a distance, and that in the confidence of the persuasion that the effect 

 could be produced, he had devised the proper apparatus by which his 

 telegraph was put in operation. Professor Gale, being then referred 

 to, stated that Mr. Morse had forgotten the precise state of the case; 

 that he, (Mr. Morse,) previous to his, (Dr. Gale's,) connexion with 

 him, had not succeeded in producing effects at a distance; that, when 

 he was first called in he found Mr. Morbe attempting to make an 

 electro-magnet act through a circuit of a few yards of copper wire 

 suspended around a room in the University of New York, and that 

 he could not succeed in producing the desired effect even in this 

 that circuit; that he (Dr. Gale) asked him if he had studied Prof. 

 Henry's paper on the subject, and that the answer was "no;" that 

 he then informed Mr. Morse that he would find the principles 



