When Morse was returning from one of his visits to Europe to study art, several of his friends on the ship were talking at the table about what someone had done by way of sending signals like lightning by means of electricity. “If they can do that,” said Mr. Morse, “why could we not write letters in a second or two from New York to Charleston with it?” The others laughed at the idea.
“Why not?” kept ringing in Mr. Morse’s ears. He stayed in his stateroom to study and think. He remembered what he had learned from his professors in college about electricity. With such materials as he could get together on shipboard, he made magnets and electrical appliances. By the time the ship sailed up New York harbor, Mr. Morse had not only a good idea of the way to go to work to make a telegraph apparatus, but he had made up the “dot-and-dash code,” now in use in telegraphy.
The idea took such a hold on his mind that he could no longer paint pictures. But when he talked to others about it, it all seemed impossible--“too good to be true”--and he could not find wealthy men who would lend money enough to enable him to prove that a message could be sent a long distance in a moment of time by telegraph.
While Mr. Morse was waiting and struggling to start “the electro-magnetic telegraph” he made a bare living by taking the first photographic likenesses, called daguerreotypes, in America.
After eleven years of hard work and poverty so keen that he had to go hungry sometimes, Mr. Morse’s friends in Congress passed a bill in the House to furnish him government money enough for a trial line forty miles long. But on the last day of the session, which was to end at midnight, there were over a hundred bills ahead of his in the Senate. Mr. Morse went home that night utterly discouraged.
In the morning Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, came to congratulate him. His bill had been passed just before midnight and the President had signed it, giving Mr. Morse all the money he needed to show how he could “send letters by lightning.”
[Illustration: MORSE’S FIRST TELEGRAPH SOUNDER]
The overjoyed inventor told Miss Ellsworth that when his line was all ready she should send the first message over it.