The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Neither Sho-kup and his people, nor indeed the men who put up the poles and stretched the wire between them, had any true idea what would eventually take place. The wire up above them looked so modest and innocent and incapable. It was just a wire. It didn’t move, except when the wind made it vibrate and send out a plangent whistling, somewhat akin to the grass on the plains when the breezes ruffle it like the sea, and it bends and waves and seems to sigh.

  The all-too-rapid changes afflicting some quarters of American society brought about by the invention of the telegraph were famously caught by the Cincinnati artist Henry Farny in his 1904 painting Song of the Talking Wire, in which a puzzled Plains Indian tries to listen to the conversation supposedly passing overhead.

  There was something odd about the metal wire. It had to do with movement. Things that shifted their ways along roads and canals and railways and even through the air above—eagles, for instance—could be seen to proceed from place to place. Such normal, traditional progress was an entirely visible thing, easy to understand. The whole arrangement—whether from a team of horses being lashed along, gouts of steam pouring from a locomotive funnel, the flap of a bird’s wing, or in later years the whirl of an airplane propeller—gave the clear impression of the frantic expenditure of some kinetic energy, which roared and thundered and zoomed and collided and perhaps had accidents but still shipped people and goods from place to place on time, or not, as the case might be.

  But the wire was something quite different. Small wonder it was so feared, so suspected, so much the target of attack. For it was always quite silent, yet it was said by those who knew that things were moving along it—and yet the peculiar thing was that if anything, either cramped and crammed inside its narrow interior or crawling precariously along its insignificant outer surfaces, was moving, it never showed.

  To a mid-nineteenth-century person—whether an Indian or a Scottish or German farmer newly arrived on the prairies or a slave survivor of the Middle Passage—the business of the telegraph wire was so unfathomable as to verge on the impossible and the magical.

  The telegraph was carrying information—and it was doing so in a manner that required no agency of man to transport it. The taking, the sending, the shifting, the transporting—all of this could be done instantly, while the carrier seemed to remain perfectly still. The invention marked a climactic moment in the history of the United States. The implications were enormous, and they were recognized immediately. The moment instant communication was within the grasp of all—banker, baker, merchant, soldier, doctor, farmer, and yes, even a hesitant Indian chief—America was bonded and annealed into an almost unbreakable and indivisible one.

  If the ultimate effects of the telegraph were to be of great benefit, its proximate effects were less so—at least, for one particular and legendary corps of ambitious and courageous men. The Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Company—the Pony Express—had begun its heroic runs between Missouri and Sacramento in April 1860, but within months the message-bearing horsemen galloping frantically between the transfer stations could see the poles rising along the roadway beside them, could see the insulators being set in place, the copper wires being strung across them.

  The end for the brave little horsemen was as swift and savage as it was inevitable. By October 1861, the cross-country connection of cables had been completed. Two days after the opening of its circuitry, with code being successfully received in California just seconds after it was tapped out in New York, the final orders went out to the Pony Express riders, too. No further men would be sent out from the stables, and the way stations built every ten miles along the two-thousand-mile route would be torn down or put up for sale. The staff who manned them would be sent home. The riders, Buffalo Bill and Frank Webner and Pony Bob Haslam and their other colleagues in the saddle, would be thanked, paid off, and their services dispensed with. Their fleet little horses would all be put out to pasture or sold off for glue.

  The electron would now take over from the spur, the saddle, and the hammered iron shoe, and matters would never be the same again.

  THE MAN WHO TAMED THE LIGHTNING

  Most information is passed between human beings as conversation, the six-century-old word that signifies the interchange of thought in words, which is conventionally conducted face-to-face in what has come to be called real time. Over long distances, conversation was seldom possible, save for a bellow across a chasm, a wave from a point on high, a chain of fires, or a series of signals sent by smoke, reflected sunlight, or rattled sticks. For any exchange beyond single-syllable simplicity and for exchanges that were to be made across truly lengthy distances, conversation in a strict sense was not possible. Hand-carried messages and letters had long been the sole alternative.

  Until the invention of the electric telegraph, which at last permitted a long-distance version of conversation. With it the transmission of information—gossip, news, or intelligence—could be accomplished, if not necessarily with perfect ease, then at least rapidly, in the blink of an eye.

  This immediacy of communication is what made the electric telegraph and its successor inventions so mystifyingly different from what had gone before. It was a development involving a new magic that until then had never been much discussed: electricity.

  Long known but long uncomprehended, electricity was recognized first as the strange attractive charge that came from rubbing chunks of natural amber with cloth. It was also realized to be lightning, which, as Benjamin Franklin had almost fatally discovered, could be brought from the sky down to earth along a conductive filament like the wet string of a kite. Electricity was also thought to be in some way related to the invisible force that made magnets attract great masses of iron and lift them unaided in a way no man could do.

  Then it was found that electricity could be hoarded and stored. A pair of Italian inventors created a voltaic pile, so-called, that produced conductible electricity, while a team of French doctors managed to bottle up already-made electricity and then use it, by discharging it, to shock patients into what they imagined might be better health. In time, man would generate this strange force, and once there was enough of it and it was massaged in certain ways to allow it to pass across great distances, it would be persuaded to do innumerable things—produce light and heat, turn wheels, calculate numbers, make sparks, help lift weights, and move objects small distances.

  In the earliest days of discovery, one possible use of electricity stood above all others. It could be made to power a subtle kind of device that would move information—a weightless thing, after all, requiring little power to transmit it—along conducting wires. If such a thing worked, it could move this information invisibly and very fast.

  Samuel Morse, who died in 1872, probably was the first to come up with the idea of an information-transmitting electric device and, if technically beaten by a nose by some other contender, he was certainly the man who perfected it. But he did so only by chance, and the achievement was not at all what was expected of him. Morse had begun work as a portrait painter, a photographer, and a professor of fine arts, yet despite his own high hopes and best efforts (but fortunately for American communications), he is unremembered in these fields, because he was not especially distinguished in any of them.

  When he came up with the idea, he was a sad and disappointed man, and not without reason. His descent into melancholy began in 1825, when he had traveled from his atelier in New York down to Washington, ostensibly to paint two portraits of the Marquis de Lafayette.* While there, he was informed by a horse messenger that his wife, back in New York, was desperately ill. By the time he returned home, he was too late; she had not only quite unexpectedly died during the birth of their fourth child, but had already been buried. It is said, perhaps fancifully, that his belief in the importance of high-speed communication—which might have allowed him to reach her bedside while she was still alive—was born at this moment.

  Nor was this to be the only tragedy of his year. Shor
tly afterward, Morse’s adored father died, and then a few months later, his mother. Stunned by all this, he fled to Europe, hoping to forget, to win painting commissions beyond the America that was for him now so freighted with misery. He prayed in particular that his artistic labors in Washington would be recognized and he would be invited to paint a great mural inside the Capitol rotunda. But that wish turned to ashes, too. The works he produced in Paris and on his tours to Italy were widely thought to be indifferent at best, and his hopes of winning commissions came to nothing. He then learned—Pelion heaped upon Ossa—that a rival, an Italian named Constantino Brumidi, had been selected by Congress to paint the ceiling of the dome.

  In October an utterly dejected and demoralized Morse, embarrassed at the prospect of being shunned by many of his more successful artist friends, decided to come home, an admitted failure. He journeyed to Le Havre in October 1832 and there boarded the French packet ship Sully, bound for New York. It was halfway across the Atlantic aboard her that he experienced the epiphany that would help him change the world.

  Voyaging through strange seas has a way of bringing together the unusual and the unanticipated, and this passage was no exception. Twenty-six American passengers were on board, not including half a dozen farmers in steerage. Each night Morse dined with the senior American diplomat in France and with a lawyer from Philadelphia, together with the captain, as well as an otherwise forgotten man named Palmer and a Harvard geologist named Charles Jackson. It was his discussions with Jackson sometime during that stormy three-week passage that let Morse see the potential usefulness of electricity.

  Both men were far from ignorant about the topic. Jackson’s scientific work in France had brought him into contact with matters electrical; and despite his ambitions in art, Morse had been taught such fundamentals of electricity as were known while he was at Yale thirty years before, and he had been interested enough in the topic to take additional classes at Columbia College in New York in the 1820s. He was also no mean inventor: twenty years before, he had made a new kind of pump and in 1822 had designed a machine to cut marble.

  Perhaps it was an innocent discussion of the properties of limestone that first brought Jackson and Morse together over an evening drink. Whatever forged the first connection, it kept them together for the rest of the journey. In the sway of the ship’s saloon, the two men are remembered for endlessly debating and discussing electricity’s mysteries, suggesting various tasks for which it might be best suited.

  Lawyers would in due course bitterly debate which one of them first suggested using electricity as a messenger, but most probably it was Morse, as Jackson’s later claims were declared the work of an embittered fantasist. (Jackson would later die in an asylum.) Suffice it to say that one of them remarked, “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by electricity.”

  In other words, if an electrical current can be made to spark, to do something that can be seen, and to do it instantly over any distance, and if that spark or a number or pattern of sparks can be made to stand for a letter or a number or a word or a name or a piece of data, then the information that these sparks denoted could likewise be transmitted instantly over any distance.

  This was a vatic revelation. Morse, who like his geographer father was an avowed imperialist, believing profoundly that America must create “the largest Empire that ever existed,” realized in an electric instant the role his imagined invention could play in such a vision. He jumped from the boat the moment it drew alongside, sped to his widower’s apartment in New York, and promptly began to draw up designs. It was far from easy. Over the next four years, primarily in his offices in the newly opened university building on Washington Square, he patiently experimented with a number of wood-and-brass-and-wire-and-mercury devices built to do one basic thing: to use something—in his case a movable notched ruler fitted with metal blanks—to open and close an electrical circuit in patterns and sequences representing words and numbers in a code of Morse’s invention.

  Information was fed into one end and sent down the wires. The circuit was then opened and closed at the other end, signaling that the information had been received. Every opening and closing of the circuit could be signified with a bell or a light or a click.

  The complexity and sophistication of the message was up to the user, and the speed at which it needed to be written was up to the user, too. All he had to do was to write, carve, or insert the metal blanks into the ruler according to the prearranged code. In Morse’s primitive devices, the code was usually no more complicated than repetitions of clicks, five of them representing the number 5, and three followed by a space and then four more signifying 34. These numbers were then used to signify letters, or whole words in a numbered dictionary. The code, scribed onto a ruler and fed into the machine, would open and close the electrical circuit in the proper sequence. Far away, at the other end of the wire, the circuit would immediately display this same pattern of clicks, to be read as 5 or 34. Let’s say a pattern of click, click-click, click-click-click was received; a secondary codebook might translate this 123 as ABC.

  From there it was a matter of refining the code and the equipment. The words NEW YORK, say, could be punched in at one end, and out of the far end would come a pattern of dots and dashes that could be recorded on a strip of paper and that, to a person able to read the code, would also spell out the same two words, NEW YORK. And crucially, in theory, no matter the distance between the writer and the reader, no matter if the seven letters and their single space were tapped out in half a second or half an hour—all were received an instant after being sent. It was an invention of great simplicity and elegance. It was to be called telegraphy, “distance-writing.” It was foolproof, exact, and precise. And it was made by Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a painter no more.

  In time and with sedulous attention to detail (which included writing to all who had been aboard the Sully, and asking if they would swear an oath to what they remembered of his telegraph-obsessed conversations at sea), Morse eventually won all arguments* as to who was first and who invented the instrument, and on June 20, 1840, he won the American patent to it. The file still exists, one of the most significant documents in world history: US Patent No. 1,647, Improvement in the Mode of Communicating Information by Signals by the Application of Electro-Magnetism.

  There were problems, inevitably. The electrical current available was too weak to allow messages to be sent as far as theory suggested. Most electricity at the disposal of experimenters was not much more powerful than the sparks that had famously made frogs’ legs twitch in experiments performed half a century earlier. To send messages farther than from one side of a room to another—and Morse’s original telegraph worked over only some forty feet before its signal petered out—required bigger and better batteries, coils, magnets, and most crucial, the invention of repeaters to amplify the signal and push it down the line with rejuvenated energy.

  Few patents in world history can be said to have had quite the same impact on society as US Patent No. 1,647, won by Samuel Morse in 1840, signaling what was, essentially, the invention of the electric telegraph. Morse began his career as an artist and turned to electrical experimentation only after being disappointed by being refused a slew of commissions.

  Soon other, more skilled inventors came to Morse’s aid. Bit by bit, measured foot by transmitted foot, the range of the device increased. The power from one galvanic cup—a primitive battery, zinc and copper plates immersed in a bath of acid—could be easily multiplied; when forty such cups were used, the signal traveled a hundred feet. When copper wires were wound more tightly around the magnet, a message could be moved a thousand feet. (Appropriately, the telegram A PATIENT WAITER IS NO LOSER was used for this test.) By the time a chemistry professor from Oxford came across the Atlantic to see a demonstration, Morse was sending messages half a mile and more, and then, triumphantly, across no less than ten miles. H
e knew he was onto something big. He started to petition friends in Washington to urge Congress to take an interest.

  “We have no doubt,” he wrote in 1838, “that we can achieve a similar result at any distance.” He felt it vital to the national good that the government be involved in development of the telegraph. “It would seem most natural to connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department,” he wrote, because he saw the telegraph as another way of transmitting letters.

  However, the Democratic Party controlled Congress at the time, and feeling that the telegraph was no matter for government (a reminder of the evolution of party-political sentiment over the years), rejected his overtures outright. Internal improvements to the country were not, the party chiefs intoned, “susceptible to federal aid.” It was instead up to the states or to private individuals to throw money into projects like this. The doctrine sharply divided politicians of the time; there was much suspicion about corruption, and no certainty that the majority of taxpayers would win the benefits for which they were being asked to pay. So Congress decided it would offer Morse no money for any public demonstration, nor would it offer any kind of official support for the establishment of a trial telegraph line between two cities.

  On the technical side, Morse’s scientist allies were almost daily helping him with improvements. One man in particular, Alfred Vail, a priest turned machinist whose family owned a foundry, came up with the crucial invention that solved the problem of the telegraph signal’s progressive weakening over distance.