132 The Smithsonian Institution 



make no reference to the facts upon which such claims have 

 been founded by others. 



His own position in regard to these matters should not be 

 misunderstood. He was professedly a discoverer, and not an 

 "inventor." He said: "My ambition is to add to the sum 

 of human knowledge by the discovery of new truths which 

 may be of some use to the world. The practical application 

 of these I leave to others." When asked why he had not 

 patented his application of the electro-magnet to the tele- 

 graph, he only replied, simply: "I thought it unbecoming 

 the dignity of true science to curtail the use of discovery to 

 personal and selfish uses ; on the contrary, I thought it right 

 to give it to the world as a means of advancing humanity." 



His testimony on behalf of the defendant in the Supreme 

 Court case of Morse vs. O'Reilly, in 1849, is convincing evi- 

 dence of his magnanimity, for he made no allusion to his own 

 experiment in Albany in which long-distance telegraphic 

 signals had been made. " Had he done so," writes Pope, 

 " and had others then living and familiar with the circum- 

 stances been brought forward to corroborate his statement, 

 the result would inevitably have proved fatal to Morse's 

 claim to the process of producing sound-signals at a distance 

 by electro-magnetism, and would virtually have thrown the 

 whole invention open to the public, a result which Henry 

 could not but have foreseen." 



Before Henry's magnets, and his discoveries in relation to 

 them, had been made, the modern telegraph was still an im- 

 possibility. It is true that when he began his work the idea 

 of an electro-telegraph was nearly a century old. Morrison, 

 of Greenock, Scotland, had as early as 1753 suggested a prac- 

 tical mode of transmitting messages by frictional electricity, 

 and galvanic and chemical telegraphs had been in use from 

 the time of Salva of Barcelona to that of the first projects of 



