A little way north of the crypt we come to the room that the Supreme Court occupied for about forty
years after the restoration of the Capitol. Out of it was sent the first message with which Samuel F. B. Morse announced to the world the success of his invention, the magnetic telegraph. Morse was perfectly convinced that his device was workable, but he had exhausted his means before being able to make a satisfactory experiment. He therefore asked Congress for an appropriation to equip a trial line between Washington and Baltimore. Some of the members scoffed at his appeal as visionary; others intimated that he was trying to impose upon the Government; only a handful seemed to feel enough confidence in him and his project to vote for the appropriation. After a discouraging struggle lasting till the third of March, 1843, Morse was at the Capitol watching the dying hours of the Congress, when his friends advised him that his cause was hopeless, and he returned to his hotel and went to bed.
Before breakfast the next morning he received a call from Miss Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, who brought him the news that after he had left the Capitol his appropriation had gone through, and the President had signed the bill just before midnight. To reward her as the bearer of glad tidings, Morse invited her to frame the first message to be sent to Baltimore. It took more than a year to build the line and insure its successful operation; but on May 24, 1844, in the presence of a gathering which filled the court chamber, the inventor seated himself at the instrument, and Miss Ellsworth placed in his hand a phrase she had selected from the twenty-third verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought!” In less time than it takes to tell the facts, the operator in Baltimore had received the message and ticked it back without an error. In that hour of his triumph over skepticism and abuse, Morse could have asked almost anything of Congress without fear of repulse.
Not all the associations which cling about the Capitol are confined to politics or legislation, science or business. The old Hall of Representatives was, in the early days of the last century, long used for religious meetings on Sundays, the Speaker’s desk being converted temporarily into a pulpit. One of the first preachers who held stated services there was a Swedenborgian. When the custom had become well established, most of the clergymen of the city consented to take the Sundays in a certain order of succession. Sir Augustus Foster, a secretary of the British Legation during Jefferson’s administration, has left us his impressions of the meetings: