27 April: Boreham on Samuel Morse

Pioneer of Telegraphy
This is the birthday of Samuel Morse. It is well over a hundred years since the first telegram was sent. The idea was not quite new. There had been dreamers and experimenters long before that, but it was reserved for Samuel F. B. Morse, in 1842, to bring the idea to fruition. It is not easy for us, circumstanced as we are today, to project the imagination back to the days before the first submarine cables were laid. And, for that very reason, it is difficult for us adequately to appreciate, the boon that novel and sensational enterprise conferred upon humanity. We take it as a matter of course that we should receive vivid descriptions of events taking place on the other side of the planet almost before the actual echoes of those distant happenings have subsided into silence.

Contrast this state of things with the conditions prevailing before the days of Samuel Morse. From Cape Trafalgar to London is about as far as from Brisbane to Hobart. The greatest naval battle in the history of the world—the battle in which Lord Nelson so gloriously fell—was fought on October 21, 1805, yet news of the epoch-making encounter did not reach London until November 6—16 days after the world-shaking event! Again, when King William the Fourth died, it took four months to convey the intelligence of his decease from London to Hobart. During a third of a year loyal subjects on this side of the globe were singing "God Save the King" in sublime ignorance of the fact that the King was in his grave and that a young Queen had ascended the throne. The next British king—Edward the Seventh—passed away in the night, and Australians were lamenting his death before the average Englishman had awakened from their slumbers to receive the mournful tidings. These are but two illustrations of the dramatic change inaugurated by Samuel Morse, and those who co-operated with him, a hundred years ago.

The High Art Of Annihilating Distance
Literature possesses very few records in which the sterling virtues of courage and patience were more strikingly exhibited than in the characters of Morse and his collaborators. While he was puzzling out the details of his intricate invention, Morse was often compelled by the sheer logic of necessity to pass 24 hours without a meal. The idea of a submarine cable was born of his homesickness. He was in Europe; his parents in America. It took at least a month to send a letter. A sentence that he had once memorised at Yale haunted him night and day: "If the circuit of electricity be interrupted, the fluid will become visible, and when it passes, it will leave an impression on any intermediate body." Morse found it impossible to resist the conviction that, this being so, the visibility of the fluid might be turned into a code of signals. The visibility would take the form of a spark. Why not make that spark represent a part of speech, a letter, a number? Why not make the absence a part of speech, the duration of the absence a part? In short, why not have an alphabet and make the sparks click it?

The idea occurred to him on a certain moonlight night on board the ship on which he was returning to America. He paced the deck all night and by dawn the alphabet was complete. It was, as Mr. E. T. Reid declares, a miracle of ingenuity and simplicity. "Men can wink it with their eyes," he says, "they can beat it with their feet, and dying men have used it when the powers of speech have failed them. The prisoner can tap it on the wall or grating of his dungeon. Lovers in distant rooms can converse by it on the floor or the gas-pipe." The most thrilling moment in the career of Samuel Morse came on a certain Summer night in 1842. Insulating a wire two miles long and covering it with indiarubber, he and a friend rowed across the bay from Castle Garden to Governor's Island, unreeling the wire as they went. He then tapped out the words: "What hath God wrought!" The signals were perfectly deciphered at the other end, and thus the first actual telegram in the history of the world had been despatched and received.

Stringing The Wires Round The World
It is, however, one thing to lay a wire temporarily across a bay and another thing to lay a cable permanently round the globe. At this point the work of Cyrus Field supplemented that of Samuel Morse. The story of Cyrus Field reads like a volume of fiction. In some respects it is unique. As a boy he conceived the idea of spending his life in doing some magnificent deed that should make his name immortal. He was poor and, as though it were the merest detail, he calmly resolved that the first item on his programme must be the making of a fortune. Going into business, he retired, immensely wealthy, at the age of 32. With all his best years before him, he was then free to look for his life work and to perform it. By a happy dovetailing of events, it chanced that, just at this time, Samuel Morse was demonstrating the possibility of despatching transatlantic telegrams, but was being baulked at every turn by the mechanical difficulty.

In his initial enterprises he had contrived to send messages from town to town by means of wires hung upon posts. But how was the wire to be carried across the ocean? Cyrus Field saw at a glance the immense possibilities of the scheme, and he determined to make the laying of the cable his personal concern. This should be the life work of which he had dreamed. The wiseacres on both continents shook the hemispheres with their laughter. The cable could not be laid, and, even if it could, the current would not travel so far. But it is pleasant to reflect today, as we look back across the intervening century, that, after patiently enduring the withering scorn and pitiless derision everywhere heaped upon their scheme, Samuel Morse and Cyrus Field both lived to see their work applauded by all mankind as a most valuable contribution to the creation of a new era in human progress and achievement.[1]

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on December 12, 1942.

F W Boreham

Image: Samuel Morse