The Road Not Guessed

The Road Not Guessed

How often do we guess wrong what's over the horizon?

A lonely, impoverished Samuel Morse took up his interest in a code-transmitting electromagnetic telegraph rather late in life, in the middle of a desperate depressive crisis over the failure of his career as an historical painter and his inability to remarry after losing his wife a decade earlier in childbirth. At the age of 44 he was crushed by the low price commanded by his magnum opus, a large painting of the interior of the Louvre. A couple of years later he was crushed again by the failure to secure an important commission for paintings to be placed in the new United States Capitol Building, as well as by a humiliating defeat in a local election -- both setbacks perhaps attributable to his maniacal and highly publicized pursuit of anti-Catholic policies. Nearly bedridden by illness or depression, he turned to a gadget he had been tinkering with in his spare time:

The apparatus he had devised was an almost ludicrous-looking assembly of wooden clock wheels, wooden drums, levers, cranks, paper rolled on cylinders, a triangular 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). The contraption was “so rude,” Morse wrote, so like some child’s wild invention, that he was reluctant to have it seen.
Morse quickly worked out a suitable code and solved enough technical difficulties to establish the device's suitability for long-distance communication. He then set about trying to get a patent and investors for development, with disappointing results for several more years.

Traveling to France to seek European government support for his invention, Morse slowly converted individuals to his vision without obtaining the substantial support he needed. A friend (who happened to be the American patent commissioner, visiting Paris) wrote:
I do not doubt that, within the next ten years, you will see electric power adopted, between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for purposes of correspondence, and men enabled to send their orders or news of events from one point to another with the speed of lightning itself . . . . The extremities of nations will be literally wired together . . . .
A Parisian English-language newspaper enthused: “This is indeed the annihilation of space.”

The good publicity nevertheless did not produce investors. In the end, Morse guessed correctly that he would do better to seek financing back in his home country. Just before he left, however, he met Louis Daguerre, another failed painter, who was exciting everyone with his new device for transferring images via a camera obscura to a canvas. Morse was enchanted with this improvement on the painterly tradition and predicted that “throughout the United States your name alone will be associated with the brilliant discovery which justly bears your name.”

Morse returned to the United States to experience rapid success. In 1844, at the age of 55, he tapped out his famous message "What hath God wrought?" over a 34-mile line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Four years later he remarried; he and his new wife produced four children, who accompanied their parents many years later on a triumphal visit to the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. By that time, Western Union had laid 50,000 miles of telegraph line.

In 1982, Morse's painting of the interior of the Louvre sold for $3.25 million.

No comments: