558 



MORSE, SAMUEL F. B. 



laid the pipe, and covered it with earth ; and 

 with this, superintended by Cornell himself, 

 the work was begun at Baltimore. Ten miles 

 had been laid when Mr. Morse was convinced 

 that the pipe would not answer, and the story 

 runs that Cornell saved him the embarrass- 

 ment of confessing failure, by purposely driv- 

 ing the machine at full speed against a rock 

 and breaking it to pieces. The whole year 

 was consumed in fruitless experiment. At 

 last, when only $7,000 of the appropriation 

 remained, Mr. Morse gave the mechanical exe- 

 cution of the work entirely into Cornell's 

 hands; the pipe system was abandoned, and 

 the wires were insulated upon poles. 



The first message was sent on the 24th of 

 May, 1844. Every part of the apparatus worked 

 imperfectly, but the feasibility of the project 

 was established, and the long struggle was 

 over. This first message was dictated by Miss 

 Annie G. Ellsworth, a daughter of the late 

 Henry L. Ellsworth, then Commissioner of 

 Patents. Miss Ellsworth had been the first to 

 apprize Prof. Morse of the congressional ap- 

 propriation, and he had promised her that she 

 should send over the wires the first message. 

 It was the sentence : " What hath God 

 wrought," and was sent by Prof. Morse at 

 Washington to his associate, Mr. Vail, at Bal- 

 timore. The first public messages were a no- 

 tice from the Democratic National Convention, 

 then in session, in Baltimore, to Silas Wright, 

 announcing to him his nomination for Vice- 

 President of the United States, and his re- 

 sponse declining it; and if; is a remarkable 

 fact that, though the dispatch from Mr. 

 Wright was read to the convention, the great 

 majority of the members were so incredulous 

 of the possibility of conveying information by 

 the telegraph, that they adjourned over to the 

 next day in order to send to Washington, and 

 obtain reliable information on the subject. 

 One episode of these five years of waiting was 

 his making the acquaintance of Daguerre, in 

 Paris, in 1839, and receiving from him the de- 

 tails of his process for preparing photographic, 

 or, as they were at first called, daguerreotype 

 pictures. From the drawings furnished him 

 by M. Daguerre, Prof. Morse constructed the 

 first daguerreotype-apparatus, and took the 

 first sun-pictures ever taken in America. To 

 him, and to his friend Prof. John W. Draper, 

 we owe the introduction of this process in a 

 state of such perfection that subsequent steps 

 of improvement have been easy. 



After his first successful demonstration of 

 the telegraph's capacity, there came a long 

 series of vexatious lawsuits. Morse's patents 

 were violated, his honors disputed, even his 

 integrity was assailed, and rival companies de- 

 voured, for a while, all the profits of the busi- 

 ness. But these troubles were finally over- 

 come, and no inventor has ever had higher 

 satisfaction in the acknowledgment of ' the 

 benefits which he had conferred upon his race. 

 His alma mater, in 1846, conferred on him the 



degree of LL. D. All the principal nations of 

 Europe gave him tokens of distinction. So 

 early as 1848, the Sultan presented him the 

 decoration of the Nishan Iftichar, or Order of 

 Glory, set in diamonds. Gold medals were 

 awarded him by Prussia, Austria, and Wtir- 

 temberg. France made him a Chevalier of the 

 Legion of Honor. Denmark gave him the 

 cross of Knight - Commander of the First 

 Class of the Order of the Dannebrog ; Spain, 

 the cross of Knight-Commander of the Order 

 of Isabella the Catholic; Italy, the cross of 

 the Order of SS. Maurice and Lazarus; and 

 Portugal, the cross of the Order of the Tower 

 and Sword. At the instance of the Em- 

 peror of the French, representatives of the 

 European states France, Russia, Sweden, 

 Belgium, Holland, Austria, Sardinia, Tuscany, 

 the Holy See, and Turkey met at Paris, in 

 1858, to decide upon a collective testimonial to 

 him, and the result of their deliberations was 

 a vote of 400,000 francs ($80,000). Scores of 

 learned societies, all over the world, admitted 

 him to membership. In 1856 the telegraph- 

 companies of Great Britain gave him a ban- 

 quet in London. In 1858 the American colony 

 in France entertained him at a grand dinner 

 in Paris. On the 29th of December, 1868, the 

 citizens of New York gave him a dinner at 

 Delmonico's. In June, 1871, a bronze statue 

 of Prof. Morse, erected, in the Central Park, 

 by the voluntary contributions of telegraph- 

 employes throughout the country, was formal- 

 ly unveiled, with an address by William Cullen 

 Bryant ; and, in the evening, a reception was 

 held at the Academy of Music, where one of 

 the first instruments used on the original line 

 between New York and Washington was 

 placed upon the stage, and connected with the 

 wires, that Prof. Morse might send, with his 

 own hand, a word of greeting to all the cities 

 of the United States and Canada. It should 

 not be forgotten that to Prof. Morse we also 

 owe the invention of the submarine cable. One 

 moonlight night, in October, 1842, he laid, in 

 New York Harbor, the first submarine tele- 

 graph, anticipating thus by more than a year 

 and a half the actual construction of the first 

 land-line. It was only an experiment, but it 

 enabled Prof. Morse to predict, the next year, 

 in a lettter to the Secretary of the Treasury, 

 the certainty of the great project which so 

 long afterward was carried out by the energy 

 of Cyrus W. Field. 



The last public service which he performed 

 was unveiling the statue of Franklin, in Print- 

 ing-House Square, January 17, 1872, in the 

 presence of a vast concourse of citizens. He 

 had cheerfully acceded to the request that he 

 would perform this act, remarking that he 

 would do so if it were to be his last. It was 

 eminently appropriate that the inventor who 

 had made the electric current his secretary 

 should thus honor that earlier discoverer who 

 had brought it from the clouds to the earth, 

 and protected dwellings from its violence. 



