Figure 31. — Morse's relay plan of 1837. From 

 J. Raid, The Telegraph in America, New York, 

 1879, P- 80. 



carried practically no traffic. Little revenue from 

 Morse's telegraph had come in by the end of the 

 year; and when Morse offered to sell his invention 

 to the Government, the offer was rejected. 



In May 1845, Morse and his associates formed a 

 private company, the Magnetic Telegraph Company, 

 in order to exploit their invention. They immedi- 

 ately set about expanding their telegraph facilities 

 and by June 1846 they could exchange messages 

 between Washington and New York. The declara- 

 tion of war between Mexico and the United States 

 one month previous to this accomplishment gave 

 additional impetus to the further expansion of the 

 telegraph, and, from that time on, use of the telegraph 

 grew rapidly in the United States.'^ Telegraph lines 

 reached St. Louis by December 1847, and New 

 Orleans by the following July. 



The initial successes of the Magnetic Telegraph 

 Company led to the establishment of a number of 

 rival organizations. Some of these companies were 

 formed for purely speculative purposes and many of 

 these did not last, but a few survived by consolidating 

 among them,selves. Others were organized for the 

 purpose of gathering and reporting news, and one of 

 these companies was the New York Associated Press, 

 formed in 1848 by several New York newspapers to 

 provide a reliable source for domestic news. Unlike 

 the British, the American railroad companies did not 

 realize the value of this new invention for the dispatch- 

 ing of trains and for the coordination of train move- 

 ments until the early 1850's. These two inventions, 

 the railroad and the telegraph, worked together in the 

 opening of the American West. A particularly en- 

 ergetic organization in this expansion was the West- 

 ern Union Telegraph Company, which was formed 

 in 1856 under the direction of Hiram Sibley who 

 merged a number of existing facilities. By 1861 the 

 telegraph system had reached California. 



z^^./-?^^'/ 'r' y^ '■/. 



29 James Reid, The Telegraph in America, New York, 1879; 

 Robert L. Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the 

 Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832-1866, Princeton, 1947. 



Figure 32. — The Morse -Vail telegraph. Top, 

 original register used in the Baltimore-Wash- 

 ington trials of 1844, now at Cornell University, 

 Ithaca, New York. (Smithsonian photo 

 29651.) Bottom, original telegraph key used 

 in the mid-1840's, perhaps at the same time 

 as the Washington-Baltimore trials. Alfred 

 Vail's signature is impressed into the wooden 

 base of both instruments. {USNM 181411; 

 Smithsonian photo 2ygyg.) 



By the end of the 1840's, other telegraph systems in 

 the United States were in competition with Morse's 

 system, for his invention had finally proven to be a 

 profitable one. One of these later systems was an 

 improvement that Bain had worked out on his elec- 

 trochemical telegraph (U.S. patent 6328, April 17, 

 1849). A more important competitor of the Morse 

 system was the letter-printing telegraph. Vail had 

 made detailed sketches of a printing telegraph as 

 early as 1837 but had never patented it. In April 

 1846 Royal E. House of Vermont invented a printing 

 telegraph whose transmitter (fig. 36) had a set of keys 

 like those on a piano (U.S. patents 4464, 9505). 

 There was one key for each letter of the alphabet. 

 Each key produced a certain number of electrical im- 

 pulses. At the receiving station these impulses ad- 

 vanced a type wheel until finally the letter that had 

 been signaled by the transmitter was reached and was 



300 



BULLETIN 228: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 



