The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (28 page)

Adams openly enjoyed sitting for his portrait, and this, Healy said, was not always the way with celebrated people. Webster, as he told Adams, likened artists to horseflies on a hot day. “Brush them off on one side, they settle on another,” Webster exclaimed.

Adams disagreed and talked of sitting for Gilbert Stuart and of the time he had spent at the Louvre looking at paintings. He talked of Lafayette and Lafayette’s beautiful wife. “I was but a small boy then, but I still remember what a deep impression the lovely Marquise made on my youthful imagination.” Talking about books and his favorite classical authors, Adams went on with such fervor that he visibly trembled with emotion. As Healy would observe years later, “In those far-away days cold indifference was not yet in fashion.”

“Having been delayed seven weeks in England, endeavoring to obtain a patent,” Samuel Morse wrote to his daughter Susan from Le Havre on July 26, 1838, “[we] are now on our way to Paris, to try what we can do with the French government.”

I confess I am not sanguine as to any favorable pecuniary result in Europe, but we shall try, and at any rate we have seen enough to know that the matter is viewed with great interest here. … I am in excellent health and spirits. …

Morse was traveling with James Gordon Bennett. The weather was ideal, the sky blue, and the Seine just as blue the whole way to Paris. “The beauty of the Seine is exquisite,” Bennett reported for his readers in the
New York Herald.
“The natural scenery along its placid winding banks, reminded me of the Mohawk above Albany. …”

Morse thought their hotel on the rue de Rivoli and the view from his window of the Garden of the Tuileries as delightful as any in Paris. It was a grand time to be back. Summer crowds filled the boulevards. The colossal Arc de Triomphe, the largest triumphal arch ever built, now completed at long last, offered from its summit yet another breathtaking panorama of the city.

In the six years since Morse left Paris, he had known seemingly endless struggles and disappointments, and then, just that February, a vivid
triumph. He was now forty-seven, his hair turning grey. He remained a widower and still felt the loss of his wife, Lucretia. “You cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted, when I was deprived of your dear mother,” he wrote to Susan, “nor in how many ways that wound has kept open.” He welcomed the prospect of marrying again, but a few halfhearted attempts at courtship had come to nothing. Moreover, to his extreme embarrassment, he was living on the edge of poverty. His time in Europe thus far had already cost him most of what little money he had.

A new position as professor of art at New York University provided some financial help, as well as studio space in the tower of the university’s new building on Washington Square, where Morse worked, slept, and ate his meals, carrying in his groceries after dark so no one would suspect the straits he was in. His two boys, meanwhile, were being cared for by his brother Sidney. Susan, the oldest child, was in school in New England.

For a long time Morse had hoped to be chosen to paint a historic scene for the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. It would be the fulfillment of all his aspirations as a history painter, and would bring him a fee of $10,000. He openly applied for the honor in letters to members of Congress, including Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. Four large panels had been set aside in the Rotunda for such works, but as yet no decisions had been made. In 1834, in remarks on the floor of the House he later regretted, Adams had questioned whether American artists were equal to the task. James Fenimore Cooper, responding in a letter to the
New York Evening Post
, insisted the new Capitol was destined to be an “historical edifice” and must therefore be a showplace for American art. With the question left unresolved, Morse could only wait and hope.

That same year, 1834, to the dismay of many, Morse had joined in the Nativist movement, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic outcry sharply on the rise in New York and in much of the country. Like others, he saw the American way of life threatened with ruination by the hordes of immigrant poor from Ireland, Germany, and Italy flooding into the country, bringing with them their ignorance and their “Romish” religion. In Morse’s own birthplace, Charlestown, Massachusetts, an angry mob had sacked and burned an Ursuline convent.

Writing under a pen name, “Brutus,” Morse began a series of articles for his brothers’ newspaper, the
New York Observer.
“The serpent has already commenced to coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us,” he warned darkly. The articles, published as a book, carried the title
Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States.
Monarchy and Catholicism were inseparable and unacceptable, if democracy was to survive, Morse argued. All the old fears and dire warnings he had been raised on, plus the memory of the soldier in Rome knocking off his hat, came rushing back. Asked to run as the Nativist candidate for mayor of New York in 1836, Morse accepted. To friends and admirers he seemed to have departed his senses. An editorial in the
New York Commercial Advertiser
expressed what many felt:

Mr. Morse is a scholar and a gentleman—an able man—an accomplished artist—and we should like on ninety-nine accounts to support him. But the hundredth forbids it. Somehow or other he has got warped in his politics. …

On election day, he went down to a crushing defeat, finishing last in a field of four.

He kept on with his teaching at the university and his involvement with the National Academy of Design. And he kept painting. A portrait of the Reverend Thomas Harvey Skinner was as deft as any he had ever painted, and a large, especially beautiful portrait of his daughter Susan received abundant praise.

But when word reached Morse from Washington that he had not been chosen to paint one of the historic panels at the Capitol, his world collapsed. Friends and fellow artists wrote to express their disappointment and sympathy, and if possible to lift his spirits. “Dismiss it then from your mind, and determine to paint all the better for it,” wrote his former teacher, Washington Allston.

Morse felt sure that John Quincy Adams had done him in. But there is no evidence of this. More likely, Morse himself had inflicted the damage with the unvarnished intolerance of his anti-Catholic newspaper essays and ill-advised dabble in politics.

He “staggered under the blow,” in his words. It was the ultimate defeat of his life as an artist. Sick at heart, he took to bed. Morse was “quite ill,” reported James Cooper, greatly concerned. Nathaniel Willis would recall later that Morse told him he was so tired of his life that had he “divine authorization,” he would end it.

Morse gave up painting entirely. He abandoned for good all his dreams of accomplishment and recognition as an artist, the whole career he had set his heart on since college days. No one could dissuade him.

“Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been cruel to me,” he would write bitterly to Cooper. “I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.”

He must attend to one thing at a time, his father had preached. The “one thing” henceforth would be his telegraph, the crude apparatus for which was also to be found in his New York University studio apartment. Later it would be surmised that had he not stopped painting when he did, no successful electromagnetic telegraph would have happened when it did, or at least not a Morse electromagnetic telegraph.

Essential to his idea, as he had set forth earlier in notes written in 1832, were that signals would be sent by the opening and closing of an electrical circuit, that the receiving apparatus would, by electromagnet, record signals as dots and dashes on paper, and that there would be a code whereby the dots and dashes would be translated into numbers and letters.

The apparatus he had devised was a strange, almost ludicrous-looking assembly of wooden clock wheels, wooden drums, levers, cranks, paper rolled on cylinders, a triangular-shaped wooden pendulum, an electromagnet, a battery, a variety of copper wires, and a wooden frame of the kind used to stretch canvas for paintings (and for which he had no more use)—all “so rude,” so like some child’s wild invention, he was reluctant to have it seen.

His chief problem was that the magnet had insufficient voltage to send a message more than about forty feet. But with help from a colleague, a professor of geology at New York University, Leonard Gale, the problem was overcome. By increasing the power of the battery and magnet, they
were able to send messages a third of a mile on electrical wire strung back and forth in Gale’s lecture hall. Morse then devised a system of electromagnetic relays, and this was the key element, in that it put no limit to the distance a message could be sent.

A physician from Boston, Charles Jackson, charged Morse with stealing his idea. Jackson—who was no relation to James Jackson, Jr.—had been a fellow passenger on Morse’s return voyage from France in 1832. He now claimed they had worked together on the ship, and that the telegraph, as he said in a letter to Morse, was their “mutual discovery.” Morse was outraged, and answering Jackson, setting him straight, as well as responding to other charges that would come out of Jackson’s claim, were to consume hours upon hours of Morse’s time and play havoc with his nervous system. “I cannot conceive of such infatuation as has possessed this man,” he wrote privately. And for this reason Cooper and Richard Habersham spoke out unequivocally in Morse’s defense, attesting to the fact that he had talked frequently with them of his telegraph in Paris well before ever sailing for home.

Morse sent a preliminary request for a patent to Henry L. Ellsworth, the nation’s first commissioner of patents, who had been a classmate at Yale, and in 1837, with the country in one of the worst financial depressions to date, Morse took on another partner, young Alfred Vail, who was in a position to invest some of his father’s money. Additional financial help came from Morse’s brothers. Most important, Morse worked out his own system for transmitting the alphabet in dots and dashes, in what was to be known as the Morse code.

In a larger space in which to string their wires, a vacant factory in New Jersey, he and Vail were soon sending messages over a distance of ten miles. Demonstrations were staged successfully elsewhere in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

There were continuing reports of others at work on a similar invention both in the United States and abroad, but by mid-February 1838, Morse and Vail were at the Capitol in Washington ready to demonstrate the machine that could “write at a distance.” They set up their apparatus and strung ten miles of wire on big spools around a room reserved for the House Committee on Commerce. For several days members of the House
and Senate crowded into the room to watch “the Professor” put on his show. On February 21, President Martin Van Buren and his cabinet came to see.

The wonder of Morse’s invention was thus established almost overnight in Washington. The Committee on Commerce moved quickly to recommend an appropriation for a fifty-mile test of the telegraph.

Yet Morse felt he must have government support in Europe as well, and thus was soon on his way over the Atlantic, only to confront in official London the antithesis of the response at Washington. His request for a British patent was subjected to one aggravating delay after another. When finally, after seven weeks, he was granted a hearing, the request was denied.

“The ground of objection,” he reported to Susan, “was not that my invention was not original, and better than others, but that it had been published in England from the American journals, and therefore belonged to the public.”

Paris was to treat him better, up to a point. The response of scientists, scholars, engineers, indeed the whole of academic Paris as well as the press, was to be expansive and highly flattering. Recognition of the kind he had so long craved for his painting came now in Paris in resounding fashion and in the most appropriate setting possible. The French knew how such occasions should be orchestrated.

For the sake of economy Morse had moved from the rue de Rivoli to modest quarters on the rue Neuve des Mathurins, which he shared with a new acquaintance, an American clergyman of equally limited means named Edward Kirk. Morse’s French had never been anything but barely passable, nothing close to what he knew was needed to present his invention before any serious gathering. But the Reverend Kirk, who was proficient in French, volunteered to serve as his spokesman and, in addition, tried to rally Morse’s frequently sagging spirits by reminding him of the “great inventors who are generally permitted to starve when living, and are canonized after death.”

They arranged Morse’s wires and apparatus in their cramped quarters and made every Tuesday “levee day” for anyone who wished to climb the stairs to witness a demonstration. Kirk, who knew little of science or
inventions, caught on quickly enough to serve as “the grand exhibitor.” Distinguished visitors and complete strangers alike came in increasing numbers to see the show.