Part 12

“Up to the autumn of 1837 my telegraphic apparatus existed in so rude a form that I felt a reluctance to have it seen. My means were very limited--so limited as to preclude the possibility of constructing an apparatus of such mechanical finish as to warrant my success in venturing upon its public exhibition. I had no wish to expose to ridicule the representative of so many hours of laborious thought. Prior to the summer of 1837, at which time Mr. Alfred Vail’s attention became attracted to my telegraph, I depended upon my pencil for subsistence. Indeed, so straightened were my circumstances that, in order to save time to carry out my invention and to economize my scanty means, I had for many months lodged and eaten in my studio, procuring my food in small quantities from some grocery and preparing it myself. To conceal from my friends the stinted manner in which I lived, I was in the habit of bringing my food to my room in the evenings, and this was my mode of life for many years.”

Before he devoted all his time to his invention Morse had been anxious to paint a large historical picture for one of the panels in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington. His offer had been rejected, and this had led a number of his friends to raise a fund and commission him to paint such a picture. He chose as his subject “The Signing of the First Compact on Board the _Mayflower_.” But he was now so much engrossed with his experiments that he gave up the plan and the fund was returned to the subscribers.

We have already heard in Morse’s statement of the arrival of Mr. Alfred Vail. He was to have much to do with the success of Morse’s invention. He had happened to call at the university building when the inventor was showing his models to several visiting scientists. “Professor Morse,” said Mr. Vail, “was exhibiting to these gentlemen an apparatus which he called his Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. There were wires suspended in the room running from one end of it to the other, and returning many times, making a length of several hundred feet. The two ends of the wire were connected with an electro-magnet fastened to a vertical wooden frame. In front of the magnet was its armature, and also a wooden lever or arm fitted at its extremity to hold a lead pencil.... I saw this instrument work, and became thoroughly acquainted with the principle of its operation, and, I may say, struck with the rude machine, containing, as I believed, the germ of what was destined to produce great changes in the conditions and relations of mankind. I well recollect the impression which was then made upon my mind.... Before leaving the room in which I beheld for the first time this magnificent invention, I asked Professor Morse if he intended to make an experiment on a more extended line of conductors. He replied that he did, but that he desired pecuniary assistance to carry out his plans. I promised him assistance provided he would admit me into a share of the invention, to which proposition he assented.... The question then arose in my mind, whether the electro-magnet could be made to work through the necessary lengths of line, and after much reflection I came to the conclusion that, provided the magnet would work even at a distance of eight or ten miles, there could be no risk in embarking in the enterprise. And upon this I decided in my own mind to sink or swim with it.”

Alfred Vail secured his father’s financial assistance, and in September, 1837, an agreement was executed by which Vail was to construct a model of Morse’s telegraph for exhibition to Congress, and to secure the necessary United States patents, in return for which he was to have a one-fourth interest in these patent rights. The patent was obtained on October 3, 1837, and Vail set to work to prepare the new models. Almost all the apparatus that was used had to be specially made for the purpose, or altered from its original use. The first working battery was placed in a cherry-wood box divided into cells and lined with beeswax, and the insulated wire was the same as that the milliners used in building up the high bonnets fashionable at that day. Vail made certain improvements as he worked on his model. He replaced the recording pencil with a fountain pen, and instead of the zigzag signals used the short and long lines that came to be called “dots” and “dashes.” He learned from the typesetters of a newspaper office what letters occurred most frequently in ordinary usage, and constructed the Morse or Vail code on the principle of using the simplest signals to represent those letters that would be most needed.

By the winter of 1837 many people had seen the telegraph instruments at the university building, but few of them considered them more than ingenious toys. Scientific men had talked of the possibilities of an electric telegraph for a number of years, but the public had seen none actually installed. Even Vail’s father began to doubt the wisdom of his son’s investment. To convince him the young man, on January 6, 1838, asked his father to come to the experimenting shop where Morse and he were working. He explained how the model operated, and said that he could send any message to Morse, who was stationed some distance away at the receiving end. The father took a piece of paper, and wrote on it, “A patient waiter is no loser.” “There,” said he, “if you can send this, and Mr. Morse can read it at the other end I shall be convinced.” The message was sent over the wire, and correctly read by Morse. Then Mr. Vail admitted that he was satisfied.

Morse now decided to bring his invention to the attention of Congress. He was permitted to set up his apparatus in the room of the House Committee on Commerce at the Capitol. There he gave an exhibition to the committee, but most of them doubted if his plans for sending long-distance messages were really feasible. On February 21, 1838, he worked his telegraph through ten miles of wire contained on a reel, with President Van Buren and his cabinet as an audience. Then he asked that Congress appropriate sufficient money to enable him to construct a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. The chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Francis O. J. Smith, of Maine, was very much interested by now, and drafted a bill appropriating $30,000 for this purpose. But the bill did not come to a vote, and the matter was allowed to drop.

Meantime rival claimants to the invention were appearing on all sides. Morse decided that he must try to secure European patents, and went abroad for that purpose. His claim was opposed in England, and in France it was finally decided that in the case of such an invention the government must be the owner. He was well received, and given the fullest credit for his achievements, but the patents were refused, and he had to return home with his small capital much depleted and business prospects at a low ebb. Moreover, the United States government now seemed to have lost interest in the subject, and his partners, the Vails, were having financial difficulties of their own.

While he waited he continued to experiment. He believed that the electric current could be sent under water as easily as through the air, and to try this he insulated a wire two miles long with hempen threads that were saturated with pitch-tar and wrapped with India-rubber. He unreeled this cable from a small rowboat between Castle Garden and Governor’s Island in New York Harbor on the night of October 18, 1842. At daybreak Morse was at the station at the Battery, and began to send a message through his submarine cable. He had succeeded in sending three or four characters when the communication suddenly stopped, and although he waited and kept on with his trials no further letters could be transmitted. On investigation it appeared that no less than seven ships were lying along the line of Morse’s cable, and that one of these, in getting under way, had lifted the cable on her anchor. The sailors hauled two hundred feet of it on deck, and, seeing no end to it, cut it, and carried part of it away with them. But the test had proved Morse’s theory, and he became convinced that in time messages could be sent across the ocean as easily as over land.

When Congress met in December, 1842, Morse again appeared in Washington to obtain financial help. Congress was not very enthusiastic over his project, but the House Committee on Commerce finally recommended an appropriation of $30,000, and a bill to that effect was passed in the House of Representatives by the small majority of six votes. The Senate was overcrowded with bills, and Morse’s was continually postponed. In the early evening of the last day of the session there were one hundred and nineteen bills to come to vote before his, and it seemed impossible that it should be taken up. Morse, who had been sitting in the gallery all day, concluded that further waiting was useless, and went back to his hotel, planning to leave for New York early the next morning. He found that after paying his hotel bill he would have less than half a dollar in the world. But as he came down to breakfast the following morning he was met by Miss Ellsworth, the daughter of his friend, the Commissioner of Patents. She held out her hand, saying, “I have come to congratulate you.”

“Congratulate me! Upon what?” asked Morse.

“On the passage of your bill,” she answered.

“Impossible! It couldn’t come up last evening. You must be mistaken,” said the inventor.

“No,” said Miss Ellsworth, “father sent me to tell you that your bill was passed. He remained until the session closed, and yours was the last bill but one acted upon, and it was passed just five minutes before the adjournment.”

In return for this news Morse promised that Miss Ellsworth should send the first message when his telegraph line was opened. That same day he wrote to Alfred Vail that the bill “was reached a few minutes before midnight and passed. This was the turning point in the history of the telegraph. My personal funds were reduced to the fraction of a dollar, and, had the passage of the bill failed from any cause, there would have been little prospect of another attempt on my part to introduce to the world my new invention.”

It had been decided to construct an underground line between Washington and Baltimore, the conductor being a five-wire cable laid in pipes, but after several miles had been laid from Baltimore the insulation broke down. A very large part of the government grant had been spent, and the situation looked very dubious. But after some discussion it was determined to carry the wire by poles, as this could be done much more rapidly and at smaller expense.

The National Whig Convention, to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President, met at Baltimore on May 1, 1844. The overhead wire had been started from Washington toward Baltimore, and by that day twenty-two miles of it were in working order. The day before the convention met Morse had arranged with Vail that certain signals should mean that certain candidates had been nominated. Henry Clay was named for President, and the news was carried by railroad to the point where Morse had stretched his wire. He signaled it to Washington, and the Capitol heard it long before the first messages arrived by train.

On May 24, 1844, the line was completed, and Miss Ellsworth was invited to send the first message from the room of the United States Supreme Court to Baltimore. She chose the Biblical words “What hath God wrought?” and this was sent over the telegraph. Vail received the message in Baltimore, and the first demonstration was a complete success. The younger man had added an improvement of his own; instead of the dots and dashes being indicated by the markings of a pen or pencil they were embossed on the paper with a metal stylus.

An incident in connection with the Democratic Convention, which was then in session in Baltimore for the purpose of nominating presidential candidates, added to the public interest in Morse’s telegraph. The Democrats had named James K. Polk for President and Silas Wright for Vice-President. The news was sent by wire to Washington, and Mr. Wright sent his message declining the honor over the telegraph. The chairman of the meeting, Hendrick B. Wright, received the message. In a letter to Benson J. Lossing he says, “As the presiding officer of the body I read the despatch, but so incredulous were the members as to the authority of the evidence before them that the convention adjourned over to the following day to await the report of the committee sent over to Washington to get _reliable_ information on the subject.” The committee returned with word that the telegraph message had been correct. Then, all but the convention committee being excluded from the telegraph room in Baltimore, message after message was sent over the wire by Vail to Morse and Silas Wright in Washington. The committee used many arguments to urge Wright’s acceptance; he answered them all, persisting in his refusal; and finally this decision was reported to the convention, which nominated Mr. Dallas in his place. The story of the part the new invention had played quickly spread abroad, and added to the intense public interest now focussed on it.

On April 1, 1845, the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was opened for general use. Congress had appropriated $8,000 to maintain it for the first year, and placed it under the direction of the Postmaster-General. The official charge was one cent for every four characters transmitted. The receipts of the first four days were one cent, for the fifth day twelve and a half cents, for the seventh sixty cents, for the eighth one dollar and thirty-two cents, for the ninth one dollar and four cents. Morse offered to sell his invention to the government for $100,000, but the Postmaster-General declined the offer, stating in his report that the service “had not satisfied him that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures.”

With the public opening of the line between Washington and Baltimore the practical success of the new electric telegraph was assured. The Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed to carry a wire from New York to Philadelphia, and thence another line was run to Baltimore in 1846. The telegraph being an accomplished fact, pirates of the patent now appeared, and for a course of years Morse and his partners had to fight for their rights. Henry O’Reilly, who had been employed in building the first lines, contracted to construct another from Philadelphia to St. Louis, and when that was finished he formed a company known as the People’s Line, to run to New Orleans. He claimed to use instruments entirely different from those patented by Morse, and so to be free from the payment of royalties. Morse applied for an injunction, and on appeal the Federal Supreme Court decided in his favor. Other similar suits followed, and in each one the decision justified Morse’s contention. The conclusion was that even though other men had known of the possibilities by experiment, it was the fact that he had first put the matter into practical form directed toward a specific purpose, and hence was to be regarded in law as the inventor.

The telegraph grew with the country. The Western Union Company followed the stage-coach across the plains to California, and soon the frontier towns were linked to the large cities of the East. Other men took up the work in other lines, and in 1854 Cyrus W. Field formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay a cable between America and Europe. As Morse had said when he first began seriously to study the subject on board the _Sully_, “If it will go ten miles without stopping I can make it go around the globe.”

The inventor found himself universally honored, and at last a very wealthy man. He married Miss Griswold of Poughkeepsie, and bought an estate of two hundred acres near that city. He was given degrees by American and European universities and societies, was made a member of the French Legion of Honor, received orders of knighthood from the rulers of Spain and Italy, Denmark, Turkey, and Portugal. In 1858 the Emperor of the French called a Congress in Paris to honor Morse, and the Congress awarded him a gift of 400,000 francs as a token of gratitude. In his eightieth year his statue in bronze was placed in Central Park, New York, and his countrymen did their utmost to show him their appreciation of his great achievement. He died in 1872, a short time after he had unveiled a statue of Benjamin Franklin in New York’s Printing-house Square.

Morse was the inventor, but his partner Alfred Vail had a great share in making the present telegraph. He discarded the original porte-rule and type of the transmitter for the key or lever, moved up and down by hand to complete or break the circuit. He perfected the dot and dash code, he invented the device for embossing the message, and replaced the inking pen by a metal disc, smeared with ink, that rolled the dots and dashes on the paper. When it was found that the telegraph operators would read the signals from the clicking of the marking lever instead of from the paper, he made an instrument which had no marking device, and in which the signals were sounded by the striking of the lever of the armature against the metal stops. This “sounder” soon drove out the old Morse recorder. The present instrument is in its mechanical form far more the work of Vail than of Morse.

XI

McCORMICK AND THE REAPER

1809-1884

The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the clergymen of the countryside. He was of that same well-developed type of countryman of whom so many were to be found in the thirteen original states and the borderlands to the west, that settler type which was the real backbone of the young country.

The McCormick house and farm was almost a small village in itself. There were eight children, and their shoes were cobbled, their clothes woven, their very beds and chairs and tables built at home. Whatever was needed could be done, the family were always busy within doors or without, and the spirit of helpfulness and invention was in the air. Into such a setting Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in 1809, the same year that saw the birth of Lincoln.

He went to one of the Old Field Schools, so called because it was built on ground that had been abandoned for farm use. He learned what other boys and girls were learning in simple country schools, but he studied harder than most of them, because he had a keen desire to understand thoroughly whatever subject he started. He saw his father busy in his workshop at all spare moments, and he took him as a pattern. After weeks of work he brought his teacher a remarkably exact map of the world, drawn to scale, and outlined in ink on paper pasted on linen, and fastened on two rollers. The work showed his ingenious fancy, and perhaps determined his father to have him educated as a surveyor. At eighteen he began this study, and had soon won a good reputation in the neighborhood as an engineer. Much of the time he spent in the fields with his father, and here he soon learned that reaping wheat was no easy task, and that swinging a wheat cradle under the summer sun was hard on both the temper and the back.

Many men had tried to lighten the farmer’s labor in cutting grain, and Cyrus McCormick’s father had long had the ambition to invent a reaper. He had succeeded in building a cumbersome machine that was pushed at the back by a pair of horses. The plan of the machine was well enough; it consisted of a row of short curved sickles that were fastened to upright posts. Revolving rods drove the wheat up against the sickles. The machine acted properly, but the grain would not. Instead of standing up straight and separated to be cut the wheat would more often come in great bunches, twisting about the sickles and getting tangled in the machinery. Mr. McCormick tried the machine in the harvesting of 1816, but it would not work, and had to be carted away to the workshop as an invention gone wrong. But he persevered with this idea, and from time to time built other models. After a number of years he brought forth a machine that would cut, but left the wheat after cutting in a badly tangled shape. He saw that this was not sufficient. The reaper to be of real use must dispose of the grain properly as well as shear the stalks.

Cyrus now took up the work that his father reluctantly abandoned. He decided to build his reaper on entirely new lines. First he dealt with the problem of how to separate the grain that was to be cut from that which was to be left standing. This he finally solved by adding a curved arm, or divider, to the end of his reaper’s blade. In this way the grain that was to be cut would be properly fed to the knife.

But the grain was apt to be badly tangled before the reaper reached it, and his machine must be able to cut that which was pressed down and out of shape as well as that which was standing straight. To accomplish this he decided that his knife must have two motions, one a forward cut, and the other sideways. He tried many plans before he finally hit upon one that solved this for him. It was a straight knife blade that moved forward and backward, cutting with each motion. This idea became known as the reciprocating blade.

Yet even though the machine could divide the grain properly, and the knife cut with a double motion, there was the possibility that the blade might simply press the grain down and so slide over it. This was especially apt to be the case after a rain, or when the grain had been badly blown about by the wind. The problem now was how to hold it upright. He found the solution lay in adding a row of indentations that projected a few inches from the edge of the knife, and acted like fingers in catching the stalks and holding them in place to be cut.

These three ideas, the divider, the reciprocating blade, and the fingers, were all fundamental devices of the machine Cyrus McCormick was building. They all met the question of how the grain could be cut. To these he next added a revolving reel, that would lift any grain that had fallen and straighten it, and a platform to catch the grain as it was cut and fell. His idea was that a man should walk along beside the reaper and rake off the grain as it fell upon the platform.

Two more devices, and his first machine was completed. One was to have the shafts placed on the outside of the reaper, or so that the horse would pull it sideways, instead of having to push it, as had been the case with his father’s model. The other was to have the whole machine practically operated by one big wheel, which should bear the weight and move the knife and the reel.