236 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



wish for what his great invention years afterward made pos- 

 sible. His words are : 



" / wish that in an instant I could communicate the information, 

 but three thousand miles are not passed over in an instant, and 

 we must wait four long weeks before we can hear from each 

 other." 



Allston introduced Morse to Benjamin West, then seventy- 

 three years old and President of the Royal Academy. West 

 accepted him as a student, and showed him many favours 

 because he was an American. Allston continued also to act 

 the part of friend and critic. The young student remained in 

 England four years, within which time the War of 1812 took 

 place. The hostilities, however, made no enmity against him. 

 In 1813 he won the gold medal of the Society of Arts for a 

 figure representing the Death of Hercules, and a large paint- 

 ing which he made of the same subject was admitted to the 

 exhibition of the Royal Academy. It was highly praised, one 

 of the British newspapers ranking it among the best nine paint- 

 ings in a gallery of nearly a thousand. 



Returning home in the summer of 1815, Mr. Morse opened 

 a studio in Boston, where he exhibited a large painting, The 

 Judgment of Jupiter, and waited for orders for historical pic- 

 tures. After a year had passed without his obtaining employ- 

 ment he started out as a travelling portrait painter and achieved 

 a moderate success. Within that year of waiting, however, his 

 genius for invention became manifest. In conjunction with 

 his brother Sidney he invented a modification of the common 

 suction pump, which could be adapted to the forcing pump 

 in the fire engine, and secured a patent for it. In his travels 

 as a portrait painter he met Miss Lucretia P. Walker, daughter 

 of Mr. Charles Walker, of Concord, N. H., and married her 

 October i, 1818. The winter before and that following his 

 marriage he spent at Charleston, S. C., in the pursuit of his 

 profession. In the winter of i8i9-'2o he painted a portrait of 

 President Monroe, for which he had received an order from the 

 Common Council of Charleston. His father having resigned 

 bis charge and removed to New Haven, Mr. Morse spent the 

 following summer there with his wife and infant daughter. 

 The next winter he executed a great picture of the House of 

 Representatives, in which were eighty portraits of mem- 

 bers. 



