DISCOURSE OF W. B. TAYLOR: NOTES. 383 



New York, came to my lecture room, and said he had a machine in 

 his lecture room or studio which he wished to show me. I accom- 

 panied him to his room and there saw resting on a table a single- 

 pair galvanic battery, an electro-magnet, an arrangement of pencil, 

 a paper-covered roller, pinion wheels, levers, etc. for making letters 

 and figures to be used for sending and receiving words and sentences 

 through long distances. - - - It was evident to me that the 

 one large cup-battery of Morse should be made into ten or fifteen 

 smaller ones to make it a battery of intensity. - - - Accord- 

 ingly I substituted the battery of many cups for the battery of one 

 cup. The remaining defect in the Morse machine as first seen by 

 me was that the coil of wire around the poles of the electro-magnet 

 consisted of but a few turns only, while to give the greatest projec- 

 tile power, the number of turns should be increased from tens to 

 hundreds, as shown by Professor Henry in his paper published in 

 the American Journal of Science, 1831. - - - After substi- 

 tuting the battery of twenty cups for that of a single cup, we 

 added some hundred or more turns to the coil of wire around the 

 poles of the magnet, and sent a message through 200 feet of con- 

 ductors; then through 1,000 feet."* 



After many trials at recording numbers by zig-zag markings 

 counted in groups separated by a space, a continuous dispatch was 

 for the first time effected on the 2d and 4th of September, 1837, in 

 the form of V-shaped lines inscribed on the paper fillet, to the fol- 

 lowing effect: "21536 2 58 112 04 01837 :" which 

 message as interpreted by a numbered vocabulary from which it was 

 compiled, expressed the phrase "successful experiment with tele- 

 graph, September 4, 1837." f 



About a month later, Professor Morse filed in the United States 

 Patent Office a "Caveat," signed October 3d, 1837, comprising: 

 " 1st, a system of signs by which numbers and consequently words 

 and sentences are signified ; 2d, a set of type adapted to regulate 

 and communicate the signs, with cases for convenient keeping of 

 the type, and rules in which to set up the type ; 3d, an apparatus 

 called a port-rule for regulating the movement of the type-rules, 

 which rules by means of the type in their turn regulate the times 

 and intervals of the passage of electricity; 4th, a register which 

 records the signs permanently ; 5th, a dictionary or vocabulary of 



* Memorial of S. F. B. Morse. 8vo. Washington, 1875, pp. 15-17. 



t A fac-simile of this first "successful experiment" was published in the New 

 York Journal of Commerce, for Thursday, Sept. 7th, 1837; and was reproduced in 

 Vail's American Electro- Magnetic Telegraph. 8vo. Philadelphia, 1845, p. 75. The 

 date, September, 1837, is accordingly that of the reduction of Morse's telegraph to 

 a practical operation. 



