HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY IN AMERICA 121 



frequency as does the lever into the arts purely mechanical. 

 It is, in fact, the first of the electro mechanical powers. Vail 

 perceived in it at the time mainly a means for making dots 

 and dashes and spaces on the record strip. Elaborating this 

 idea, he invented the telegraphic alphabet which, equally with 

 the Vail magnet, was indispensable to the success of the 

 telegraph, and which, being originated to serve the needs 

 of the electric telegraph, has proved to be the means of giving 

 inconceivably wider scope and capacity to systems that had 

 been in existence thousands of years. When Vail maile the 

 alphabet, which is still known as the Morse code, he expected 

 to employ in transmitting it a ''mechanical correspondent'' 

 constructed much like the Morse type rule. But in actual 

 practice, Vail learned to mark the necessary intervals by his 

 inward sense of time, finding that he could operate perfectly 

 by using his hand alone to control the dipping of the wires 

 into the mercury cup. Still later he constructed a spring fin- 

 ger kej^, which is the same in all essential particulars as that 

 now in use. 



We have seen that the pencil and the fountain pen were 

 alike objectionable as recording devices, and they were both 

 ultimately superseded by a steel embossing point, beneath 

 which was the strip of paper running over the grooved roller. 

 In most cases where the alphabetic code is recorded to-day, 

 the mechanism is substantially that last described, which 

 Vail expressly claimed to have invented. The recording 

 instrument used by Vail at Baltimore in 1844, and now at 

 the national museum in Washington, includes Vail's improve- 

 ments both on the magnet and the recorder. But, as neither 

 Morse nor Vail foresaw, the whole mechanism so carefully 

 devised for recording the messages was soon discovered to be 

 useless. Operators began to read by sound, as they still do, 

 and the register under ordinary conditions fell into disuse. 



The telegraph which Morse set out to invent was a re- 

 cording telegraph, and this he actually embodied in the 

 working model of 1837. Thus much — and it is much — 

 measures his claim as an inventor. The recording principle, 

 first utilized by Harrison Gray Dyar, of New York, in 1827, 

 is of importance in itself, and because it led to better things, 



