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Figure 29. — Sketches on faded pages of Morse's notebook of 1832. At left, 

 page with drawing of an electrochemical or electrostatic telegraph with combi- 

 nations of signs; at right, drawing of an electromagnetic telegraph. From 

 F. O. J. Smith's copy of Morse's notebook in the Smithsonian Institution. 

 {Smithsonian photos I74yg, 443()o-C.) 



For the remainder of 1837 Vail worked on the Morse 

 invention at Morristown, New Jersey, where his 

 father owned and ran the Speedwell Iron Plant, 

 while Morse worked out a dictionary for the machine 

 whereby numbers indicated words, as in the sema- 

 phore telegraph. 



On January 6, 1838, the three partners had an 

 instrument that could operate through 3 miles of 

 wire. It differed somewhat from the register of the 

 previous year in that the motion of the armature 

 was now vertical instead of horizontal and resulted 

 in dots and dashes on the tape instead of zig-zag 

 marks. (It is difficult to determine the relative 

 share of Morse and of Vail in these transformations 

 since the partners agreed to ascribe all changes to 

 Morse.) These dots and dashes formed the elements 

 of an alphabetic binary code and were the ancestor 

 of our present-day Morse code. On January 11, 

 1838, the partners made a public demonstration of 

 their apparatus in Morristown using Morse's dic- 



tionary. Other demonstrations were made at New 

 York University on January 24 and at The Franklin 

 Institute on February 8. On February 20 the in- 

 strument was demonstrated to the Committee of 

 Commerce of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

 There the chairman of the committee, F. O. J. 

 Smith, made a favorable report on the Morse 

 invention. 



Morse and F. O. J. Smith (who soon became an- 

 other partner) spent the rest of 1838 and the begin- 

 ning of 1839 in Europe in an attempt to obtain patents 

 and financial backing abroad. Sometime during 

 this period Vail sent Morse a new form of transmitter 

 that was operated manually instead of being auto- 

 matic. This was the '"key" that has since becom.e 

 familiar to all. Although Morse made several suc- 

 cessful demonstrations in Europe he did not find any 

 backers, and legal difficulties prevented his obtaining 

 any overseas patents. 



298 



BULLETIN 228: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY .\ND TECHNOLOGY 



