318 HENRY AND THE TELEGRAPH. 



Professor Gale, when asked in 1856, if he wonld give a statement for 

 publication, of the IMorse apparatus as originally constructed, and be- 

 fore being modified by himself, i^romptly responded in a letter dated 

 Washhigton, April 7, 185G : " This a])paratus was JMorse's original in- 

 strument, usually kijown as the type apparatus, in which the types, set 

 up in a composing-stick, were run through a circuit-breaker, and in 

 which the battery was the cylinder battery, with a single pair of plates. 

 The sparseness of the wires in the magnet coils, and the use of the single 

 cup battery, were to me on the first look at the instrument, obvious 

 marks of defect, and I accordingly suggested to the professor, without 

 giving my reasons for so doing, that a battery of many pairs should be 

 substituted for that of a single pair, and that the coil on each arm of the 

 magnet should be increased to many hundred turns each : which experi- 

 ment (if I remember aright) was made on the same day, with a battery 

 and wire on hand, furnished I believe by myself: and it was found that 

 while the original arrangement would only send the electric current 

 through a few feet of wire, (say from fifteen to forty,) the modified ar- 

 rangement would send it through as many hundred. Although I gave 

 no reasons at the time to Professor Morse for the suggestions I had pro- 

 posed in modifying the arrangement of the machine, I did so afterward; 

 and referred in my explanations to the i)aper of Professor Henry, in the 

 nineteenth volume of the American Journal of Science. ... At the 

 time I gave the suggestions above named, Professor Morse was not famil- 

 iar with the then existing state of the science of electro-magnetism. Had 

 he been so, or had he read and appreciated the paper of Henry, the sug- 

 gestions made by me would naturally have occurred to his mind, as 

 they did to my own. . . . Professor IMorse expressed great surprise 

 at the contents of the paper when I showed it to him, but especially 

 at the remarks on Dr. Barlow's results respecting telegraphing."* 



In a letter published in the Sunday Chronicle at Washington, in 1872, 

 Professor Gale (strongly vindicating the propriety of erecting a monu- 

 ment to Professor Morse — not as a Discoverer but as an Inventor,) con- 

 ceded that "Morse knew nothing of Henry's discovery when he invented 

 his machine. Henry's discovery was published in 1831. Five or six years 

 later IMorse invented his telegraphic machine, without having seen an 

 account of Henry's experiments till shown to him bj' myself" t And from 

 this consideration he justly exonerates him from the imputation of 

 plagiarism whicli had been inconsiderately brought against the distin- 

 guished inventor. In a letter addressed to Prof. E. IS". Horsford, of 

 Cambridge, IMass., dated Washington, May 18, 1872, the same writer 

 said: "I adapted to Morse's machine the modification which was taken 

 from Henry's experiments of 1831. [Properly of 1829, and 1830.] But 

 Morse, not having been accustomed to investigate scientific facts, could 

 not appreciate the investigations of Henry as applicable to the tele- 



^Si)tltltiiO)uan lieport for 1857, pp. 9:^, 93. 

 \Su)idai) Chronicle, Washington, March 3, 1872. 



