[GreenKeys] World's first telegraph message

[Jim Haynes]

Well actually Morse didn't invent the Morse code either.  He had proposed
a code based on numbers, where you would have to look up in a code book
what numbers represented, until you had memorized it.  Invention of the
code is usually attributed to Morse's assistant, Alfred Vail.  He being
the one who went to a print shop and counted the pieces of type in each
compartment to determine the frequency of letters in the language, and
then assigned the shortest codes to the most frequent letters.

But I think we have to cut Morse some slack.

He realized you could make a telegraph based on electromagnetism.  He
may have learned this on his return trip to the U.S. from France.
Others had tried telegraphs based on static electricity, or on electrical
effects on chemicals.  Joseph Henry had already discovered 
electromagnetism, but I don't believe he had carried the idea forward
to a system for transmitting information.

Morse realized the system would have to operate over a single wire.
Anybody could invent a telegraph using 26 wires, and there were
telegraphs in England using six wires, but that was not economical
or sustainable over long distances.

He knew that information had to be efficiently encoded for the telegraph
to be practical.  It wouldn't do if the process was so cumbersome that
a horse could outrun the message.

Morse realized there was a market for the service - that people would
be willing to pay for rapid communication.  This may have come to him
from his work as an itinerant portrait painter, when postal mail never
caught up with him in his travels.  His wife died while he was on one
of these trips, and he didn't learn about it until he got home.

With all due credit to the scientist Joseph Henry, I don't believe he
was thinking like an entreprenuer.

Now there is the matter of Morse's name being on all the patents, even
for things that others like Alfred Vail had invented.  We have to 
remember than in the 1840s the whole system of patents and intellectual
property and corporate invention was in a very rudimentary form.
You didn't start a company, hire engineers, and require them to assign
their inventions to the company.  The business arrangements were messy.
So it was probably necessary to make Morse the owner of all the patents
to keep them from getting even more messy.

The way Alfred Vail got into working with Morse was that the Vail family
owned an iron works, and if the telegraph succeeded Morse would need
a lot of iron wire, as well as money.  (Copper in those days was costly
and of poor strength, so was unsuitable for use as long distance line
wire.)

I've read that Morse perhaps suffered from bipolar disorder, and then
it is stereotypical that artists are odd critters.  It was said there
were days when he was just bubbling over with enthusiasm, and other
days when he would hardly get out of bed.

Some references:

The Story of Telecommunications by George P. Oslin.  Oslin was the
public relations man for Western Union and wrote the book when he
was in his 90s after retiring.

The Telegraph : a History of Morse's Invention and Its Predecessors
in the United States by Lewis Coe.  This book complements Oslin's in
that it appears to have been written from the view of Postal Telegraph
Co., Western Union's competitor until 1942.

The American Telegrapher : A Social History by Edwin Gabler  This is
basically about labor relations in the telegraph industry, but includes
wonderful stories about the lives and times of telegraphers.

Old Wires and New Waves; The History of the Telegraph, Telephone and
Wireless by Alvin F. Harlow   Status of all the above from the beginning
until the late 1930s

Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse by Kenneth
Silverman.  I haven't read this one yet.

Jim W6JVE
 	---

 	"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