[ARC5] Alfred Vail - the true inventor of 'Morse' code

[Jim Haynes]

The children's version of history is that Morse invented the telegraph,
rattling sounders, green eye shades and all.  The revisionist version
is that Morse was pretty quick to claim inventions that others had
invented.

I think we have to cut Morse some slack in view of what he did and
what the corporate situation was like in his day.

Morse realized that electromagnetism could be the basis of a practical
long-distance telegraph.

He realized that a practical telegraph had to work over one wire.  Hence
it was necessary to encode the alphabet in some system of symbols that
can be transmitted electrically to represent the symbols of message
communication.

He believed there was a market for the service.  This might be
because his wife died while he was on the road as an itenerant portrait
painter.

Then we have to consider what it was like to do a technological
business in the earlh 1800s.  The U.S. was a new nation having to find
its way with business law and technology and a patent system.
Financial backers had to find a way to make a profit from a business
that had its financial assets srewn over hundreds of miles of
wilderness.  How do you establish the monetary value of such a
business?

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man