Samuel F. B. Morse is known as the father of the American commercial telegraph, but he would not have succeeded without Alfred Vail as his partner. History glorifies Morse but credits little, or nothing, to Alfred. The reasons are complicated, unfair and more than a little sad.

Since Benjamin Franklin's experiments with lightning, scientists had sought a way to communicate rapidly over long distances with electricity -- to telegraph, from the Greek, tele, far off, and graphein, to write. Early communications were very primitive. Ancient man used smoke signals, drums and beacon fires, to which the Greeks added the heliograph and semaphore. Carrier pigeons and horn blasts were used in the Middle Ages and rocket and flag signals were introduced in the seventeenth century. Even so, the most advanced, large-scale system in the early 1800's was Napoleon's semaphores, but this too could transmit only brief messages. Even important news had to be sent by letter: When Morse's first wife died in New Haven in February 1825 while he was painting Lafayette's portrait in Washington, the message took four days to reach him; she had already been buried by the time he could return home. Thus when Morse's machine was proven practical at Speedwell in January 1838, instantaneous long-distance communication took a most dramatic leap forward.

The perfected telegraph revolutionized nineteenth-century communications. News that had taken days or months could be relayed in minutes by a relatively simple process and a compact machine. Not only could this telegraph machine send messages at any hour or in any weather, but it could transmit both letters and numbers and provide a permanent record on paper. Many of the discoveries made in the process of improving the Morse telegraph set in motion the invention of the marvelous communication systems we have today.

Early Tests

On September 2, 1837, still uncertain and insecure about his future, Alfred visited his alma mater, the University of the City of New York. He accidentally walked in on a demonstration Samuel Morse was giving on his "electro-magnetic telegraph." Morse was transmitting a message, coded by numbers representing words, over one-third of a mile of wire coiled around the room. Despite the awkward design and operation, Alfred was quickly drawn to this "magnificent machine" as if by its magnet. The fascinated Alfred persuaded his father and brother at Speedwell to help him provide Morse with all the necessary assistance, mechanical advice, a workshop with tools and the money to perfect the telegraph.

Morse, the skillful promoter, painted a glowing future for the telegraph. He needed $2,000, a very considerable sum for those days and an astonishing investment to request during a severe depression. Morse's own well-to-do brothers had refused to contribute. Yet the approval of Alfred's latest idea by Stephen and George is not as strange as it might seem. Morse, after all, was a founder with his brother Sidney of the Journal of Commerce, which both the Judge and George read carefully. They were all Democrats, admirers of Andrew Jackson and his ideas, and Nativists, believing that the United States should rely on its own people's talents and resources instead of looking to Europeans for leadership. Furthermore, Stephen probably saw an opportunity to bring Alfred back at long last to Speedwell. George also backed the project with money and became Alfred's silent partner.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was not yet the famous man he would become, the man commemorated in books, in statues, and on medals, the eagerly sought speaker, a proposed candidate for New York mayor and United States President, a hero around the world. In 1837, he was in mid-life, a widower with children to support and a financial failure in his chosen career of art. He had studied the old masters in Italy and France and became a pupil of Benjamin West in London, where he won awards for a sculpture and painting of "The Dying Hercules." Back in the United States, however, he painted portraits for $15 each. Some of these were excellent and he painted many famous people such as President James Monroe, William Cullen Bryant, Noah Webster, as well as the aging Lafayette. However, he preferred to paint large historical murals or allegorical and mythological subjects, at which he was no better than his competitors. As president of the Eucleian Society, Alfred had paid $60 for a romantic but forgettable "Allegorical View Showing New York University." In 1835, Morse became an unpaid Professor of the Literature of Fine Arts, a position that allowed him to accept private students in his rooms in the north tower of the University. However, he had come to the conclusion that he must turn his efforts, at least temporarily, from art to science where he hoped to have more financial success.

The inspiration for the telegraph machine had come to Morse in talks with Dr. Charles T. Jackson while sailing from Le Havre to New York in 1832 aboard the packet Sully. This happened to be the same year in which Joseph Henry, a science teacher at Albany (N.Y.) Academy, set up an electro-magnetic system using bells. However, Morse was unaware of this. In the summer of 1837, Morse was still working on this invention with the help of Alfred's friend Dr. Leonard Gale, a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University. It was in Gale's lecture hall where Alfred saw Morse's demonstration.

Alfred and Morse had known each other as college student and professor. They had shared the same boarding house for a time and attended the same Mercer Street Presbyterian Church. Like Alfred, Morse had contemplated the ministry seriously but abandoned it. Like Alfred, Morse had a father, the celebrated minister and geographer Dr. Jedidiah Morse, who thought that his Yale-educated son had thrown himself away by his choice of career. Both Alfred and Morse were strong believers in American culture; Morse was founder and first president of the National Academy of the Arts of Design. However, the personalities were very different. Morse was artistic in taste and temperament; he was a natural leader and organizer of men, energetic, impetuous and unafraid of controversy. Alfred had what Morse lacked -- mechanical genius, single-minded purpose now that his mind was captured, and loyalty, which would be sorely tried.

The Partnership Begins

On September 23, 1837, an agreement was signed between Morse and Alfred in which the latter promised to construct by January 1, 1838, "at his own proper cost and expense" a model of the telegraph to exhibit before officials in Washington. The Vails were also to pay for all incidental expenses including the cost of the patent. In return Alfred was to receive one-fourth of all American rights, of which George as silent partner would receive one-half. Alfred and George would also split one-half the rights in France, England, Scotland and Ireland if the Vails financed the patents in those countries. All patents were to be "taken out in the name and for the exclusive benefit" of Morse. The agreement was very specific about the treatment of all improvements and new inventions that might arise from the telegraph experiments:

In case either of the said parties [Morse or Vail] shall make new discoveries...or any new invention...in any manner, he will, as soon as practicable, communicate the same to the other, and it shall be the property of each, the same proportion as their respective rights in the whole.

At about the same time, Dr. Leonard Gale became a partner with another one-fourth interest. That left Morse with one-half rights and an agreement that legally entitled him to the major share of the credit.

On October 6, Morse filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office because "the machinery for a full practical display of his invention is not yet completed and he therefore prays protection of his right till he shall have matured his machinery." The caveat specified the following inventions: a system of signs by which numbers and consequently words were signified; a set of type to communicate the signs; a port-rule for regulating the movement of the type; a register which records the signs permanently; a dictionary or vocabulary of words, numbered and adapted to this system of telegraph; and modes of laying the conductors.

The document concluded: "What I claim as my invention...is a method of recording permanently electrical signs, which by means of metallic wires or other good conductors of electricity convey intelligence between two or more places."

In brief, Morse's idea was to employ the electro-magnet in a machine that would make a mark on a piece of paper each time a switch was operated. He proposed assigning numbers to words in a dictionary. To send a message one would write it out, go to the dictionary to find the numbers assigned to each word and then send these numbers on the machine by opening and closing a switch. The switch in effect operated the electro-magnet which was connected to a lead pencil that made marks on a moving paper strip. The receiver translated these marks back from numbers into words using the same dictionary. All of this sounds simple in today's technology, but at the time there had been no practical application for electricity and Morse and his associates were pioneering.

Alfred chose young William Baxter, an apprentice at the Speedwell Iron Works, to be his assistant and for nearly a year they shared each other's confidences and alternating moods of depression and elation as experiments failed or succeeded. They worked on the top floor of the old cotton factory in a big room with good window light, well fitted with tools. Above all, it was out of the way, for this project had to be conducted in great secrecy and behind locked doors until a patent was obtained.

Although Stephen had invited him to stay until the project was finished, Morse was an infrequent visitor. Much of the communication was by letter unless Alfred visited New York. In mid-October, Morse wrote to Alfred, "I long to see the machine you have been making and the one you have been maturing in the studio of your brain." But in late October, when Morse finally came to Speedwell, he stayed longer than he planned only because of a bad cold and a different kind of project. He wrote his brother Sidney on November 8:

But through a kind Providence I have been thrown among attentive, and kind and skillful friends, who treated me more like one of their own children than like a stranger. Mrs. Vail has been a perfect mother to me…This sickness will, of course, detain me a while longer than I intended, for I must finish the portraits before I return…The machinery for the Telegraph goes forward daily; slowly but well and thorough.

The portraits were of Stephen and Bethiah, commissioned as a tactful way to give Morse some spending money. Morse had been so financially embarrassed that Alfred or Stephen had paid the stagecoach fare to Speedwell. Morse later selected the frames in New York, assuring the Vails that they were getting a $13 value for only $12!

There were many stumbling blocks to improving Morse's model. Baxter noted:

The mechanical difficulties of the undertaking can hardly be comprehended by the electricians of the present time, who are in the habit of finding all sorts of materials and appliances ready made. Our first battery was constructed of cherry wood, divide into eight compartments lined with beeswax, to resist the action of the acids. The form of the zinc and copper elements, and, in fact, every detail, involved a new series of experiments. Conducting wire was not known on the market, and the best substitute obtainable was milliners wire, such as was used to give outline to the sky-scraper bonnets of the day. It was of copper, that might be made to retain any form…and it was a good conductor, although the insulation of the cotton covering was somewhat imperfect. However, it was the best obtainable, and the market was drained for the experiment.

At first Alfred was hampered by awe for the senior Morse, who was 46 years old to Alfred's 30. However, soon he gained confidence and began using his wonderful inventive powers to make significant changes. As Morse's wooden machine was reconstructed in metal, many improvements occurred.

In September, Alfred made a detailed plan of what he called the "Electro Magnetic Printing Telegraph," which printed letters, not numbers. The machine was not constructed, apparently because it was more complicated and slower in operation than Morse's simple records, but it may well have been the first plan for a teleprinter machine. Turning attention back to the recorder, Alfred with Baxter and possibly others produced a modified version which used one cylinder at a time to advance the paper strip instead of the two cumbersome alternating cylinders of the original.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gale at New York City University provided invaluable assistance because of his chemical background and because he was far more familiar than Morse with the experiments of others. Gale constructed two Cruickshank batteries of 60 plates, each six inches square. Applying one of Joseph Henry's discoveries, Gale was able to increase the intensity of the current by increasing the number of turns in the magnets and the number of cells in the battery.

Morse compiled his code dictionary, assigning a number to each of some 5,000 commonly used words. "It is a most tedious, never ending work," Morse wrote Alfred on October 14. It would be no less tedious to use: For example, "England" was represented by 252; "Wednesday," by 4030. Yet the confident Morse continued, "You will be pleased with my plan of the permanent dictionary, which I have drawn out ready to show you when I see you."

On October 24, wire reels made at Speedwell were delivered to New York and Morse again wrote to Alfred, "The reels have arrived safely and we admire the workmanship of them exceedingly; they are exactly right." However, the months of November, December, and the deadline of January 1, 1838, came and went without a completed working model. It was a trying time at Speedwell, especially since there was genuine fear that Stephen would stop the experiment if success did not come quickly. To forestall the fatal confrontation, Baxter was posted at the window to see when the Judge went home to dinner. Then Alfred would scurry across from the Factory to dine with his sister Sarah Cutler, who lived in what is now known as the Vail House, and return to work without meeting his father.

Feverish activity behind locked doors, requiring visits and frequent exchange of letters from New York, is difficult to keep secret. Baxter noted;

The more intelligent conceded that it might prove an interesting toy, but the hard-fisted farmers of Morristown regarded the experiment as a wanton and inexcusable waste of money and as the one solitary instance of bad judgment on the part of the Vails. When the Judge rode down to the village they would "joke" him in regard to the lightning machine and caution him against the danger of being "struck." As I was especially identified with the undertaking, I was known among the youths of the village as the "lightning boy" and became the butt of the place.

First Demonstration

At last on January 6, 1838, the machine was ready to be demonstrated. The cotton-covered hat wire was coiled around the room on nails to equal a distance of two miles. Alfred sent Baxter to "invite Father to come down and see the 'Telegraph' machine work," which sent the eager lad plunging into the cold afternoon without stopping to throw a coat over his shop clothes.

The machine that sent Stephen's message, "A patient waiter is no loser," was still far from perfect. A few days later several hundred men and women crowded into Speedwell to witness the first public demonstration. The message this time had a practical cast: "Railroad cars just arrived, 345 passengers." It foreshadowed the connection between transportation and communications systems that the telegraph would have for the next 100 years. Morse wrote his brother Sidney, "We have shown it to the Morristown people with great éclat…. The success is complete." The local newspaper, The Jerseyman, reported that "Time and distance are annihilated, and the most distant points of the country are by its means brought into the nearest neighborhood."

At the end of January, Morse and Alfred exhibited the improved telegraph in New York at the University, using 10 miles of copper wire. Through Alfred's ingenuity, Morse's receiver now employed a vertical mechanism which embossed dents and lines in the paper and Morse's numbered dictionary code, requiring double translations, was replaced by an alphabet code employing dots and dashes. Alfred had made the telegraph practical.

The New York demonstration was not without problems. Alfred wrote George on January 22:

We received the machine on Thursday morning and in an hour we made the first trial, which did not succeed - nor did it with perfect success until Saturday - all of which time Prof. Morse was rather unwell.

In the same letter, he complained:

Prof. M has received a letter … inviting us to exhibit at Phila. … But has said nothing to me about his intentions. He is altogether too inclined to operate in his own name, so much so that he has had printed 500 blank invitations in his own name at your expense. I have further to inform you that he has hinted that he expects you or papa to pay his expenses to Washington and I presume back again …. Prof. M wants and wants and I am without funds.

The next day when Alfred wrote George, he was somewhat happier as the exhibition had gone well:

Our audiences are astonished and delighted. See papers tomorrow … Prof. Morse feels better and will perhaps be willing to have us share with him in the honours … I am obliged to beg money to purchase materials for the battery, &c. I think it is rather a shame.

A pattern was forming:

In Philadelphia in February, Morse and Alfred demonstrated the telegraph before a committee of the Franklin Institute. Alfred wrote his father and brother that the machine was presented with "perfect satisfaction" but that "Prof. M. is indisposed when there is anything to do."

In the same letter Alfred noted that Morse was still trying to act independently:

Prof. M. seems inclined to go by himself [and] appears unwilling that I should accompany him to see any of the Great Folks - has called upon the President, [Judge] Woodbury, and [Patent Commissioner] Ellsworth … I asked him to go with me to see Dickerson [a General who offered to help] but he evaded it.

Alfred showed amazing restraint. There are few known instances when he spoke to Morse directly about a slight. He wrote about one to George:

In regard to Prof. M. calling me his assistant, this is settled and he has said as much as to apologize for using it, that he supposed it synonymous with partner, colleague.

Alfred and Morse were invited to demonstrate the telegraph for several weeks in the rooms of the House Committee on Commerce at the Capitol. Congressmen, foreign dignitaries and the just-plain curious stopped by to view the invention. On February 17, 1838, Alfred reported breathlessly from the "Committee Room on Commerce":

The labors of the week have cleared and with the most unexpected success. Hundreds have witnessed the operation of the machine and its almost incredible powers...I see members of Congress eager to witness the powers of the machine and ... utter exclamations of wonder and amazement. Some say the world is coming to an end; others -- what would Jefferson think .... Where will improvements and discoveries stop? ... Some members ... bring in a half dozen more, and then they come again and again. Mr. Calhoun after he had seen it ... sent down a dozen other Senators to witness it. And so we go. The President and Cabinet have signified their intention to come.

On February 21, President Van Buren and his Cabinet came.

I have the pleasure to inform you that they were highly delighted and entirely satisfied. The President proposed the following sentence: "The enemy is near" to Prof. M. silently so that I could not and did not hear it. It was then put up on numbers and written on the register. I send you the actual thing itself which I wish you to preserve for me.

Note the numerical code was back in use. Was the dot-and-dash system too new to risk before such distinguished guests?

The second message was chosen by Dolly Madison, who sent love to a cousin in Baltimore.

The same day Morse wrote ingratiatingly to George:

The President and Heads of Departments came in a body to see it today, the same result in the highest gratification was expressed by all and each ... I shall be able to spare Alfred in a few days. I think I could not well have done without him.

Stephen and George wanted Alfred to return to Speedwell and had been pressing him for some time. Did they think -- hope -- that his telegraph work was done and he could now take his rightful place at the Iron Works?

Morse thought that the U.S. Post Office should run the telegraph service and hoped to persuade Congress to appropriate $30,000 to build an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. However, although the Commerce Committee and especially its chairman, Congressman Francis Ormond Jonathan ("Fog") Smith of Maine, were impressed, many lawmakers were not. Despite what Morse and Alfred believed, many Congressmen were dubious, sometimes downright hostile. Cave Johnson, unfortunately later Postmaster General, suggested sarcastically that the appropriation be divided equally between experiments in mesmerism and "the other absurdity." Some constituents agreed with the farmers of Morristown. A Congressman Wallace was defeated at the polls, charged with voting away the people's money on this preposterous scheme. There would be no appropriation for five years.

Chairman Smith, however, had recognized the telegraph's vast possibilities immediately. He prepared a bill for the House, although he knew it had little chance of passing at that time. He also expressed a wish to become a partner in the enterprise, although a seeming conflict of interest. Morse agreed, recognizing a need for a promoter familiar with Washington's intrigues and another source of cash. Alfred and Gale apparently agreed for the same reason. Smith was to provide legal counsel and pay for the three-month trip for Morse and himself to seek European patents. An agreement was signed on March 2, 1838. Morse, of course, remained the majority shareholder. Smith's proportion was 5/16. Alfred and George's was lowered to 3/16. Nevertheless, Alfred went back to Speedwell to make two instruments for Morse to take abroad. Morse went back to other interests, including his first love, painting, and a new one, daguerreotype.

Improvements

Back at Speedwell, Alfred made more significant changes. The machine looked less and less like the one Morse had fist demonstrated and for which the caveat had been issued. A gravity feeder for the type was added to the transmitter. The recorder's lead pencil, which frequently smudged, was replaced by four pens attached to an armature that moved vertically. Baxter wrote:

We found that the pencil needed frequent sharpening and that when freshly sharpened, it made a different mark from that made by a worn point. Vail contrived a fountain pen that made a uniform line. It did not suit Mr. Vail, however, as it slung the ink sidewise when it was jerked by the action of the magnet, and he spent some days in devising a remedy. [Also] the fountain pen was unreliable and sometimes failed to mark. We made a gang of four pens, on the theory that at least one of the four would record the message.

On April 13, 1838, Morse wrote "Fog" Smith from New York City:

I have just returned from Morristown and found that Mr. Vail had nearly completed the apparatus and in a very compact and convenient manner for travelling, Mr. Vail had completed a straight port rule on a plan of his own, which operates exceedingly well, so that for exhibition abroad, we shall not need another .... The register acts well. The pen which is so divided as to make 4 copies of the intelligence at the same moment is also newly invented.

Morse and Smith sailed for England in May with one of two new models. A second was to be sent to France.

Morse was truly fortunate to have had such a modest and unassuming partner, willing to devote so much time and inventive energy while receiving ever less opportunity for financial or personal gain. True, Alfred had signed the constricting agreement of September 1837 -- but Morse was uncommonly anxious to take all the credit contrary to the spirit of the agreement. Yet Alfred was enjoying himself -- fulfilling himself really -- and he invented on.

Meanwhile in England, Morse was refused a patent on the technical ground that his invention had already been described in print in America even if it had not been patented. The real reason was chauvinistic, a protection for Englishmen seeking telegraph patents.

In France, the reception was friendlier but no more productive. Alfred had sent another improved model to Paris that Morse had never seen. Morse demonstrated it before the French Academy of Science where it was greeted with the high praises of extraordinaire, admirable. However, receiving a French patent had no meaning. French law required that a line be built within two years or the patent would lapse. Since neither the government nor a private company would finance such a line, there was no hope of keeping it.

While in France, Morse also talked to representatives of the Russian government, reaching what he thought was an accord. This was later negated by the Emperor.

Morse returned to the United States empty-handed.

The American patent for the telegraph was issued to Morse in June 1840, financed as agreed by the Vails. Morse was now ready to resume the battle for the $30,000 Congressional appropriation. Here again, he was incredibly lucky. He received the support of Professor Henry, who, having seen the machine in operation, wrote him a letter full of praise and support that could be used persuasively with Congress.

Meanwhile, Alfred had married Jane Elizabeth Cummings on July 23, 1839, at her widowed mother's house in New York. Stephen and Bethiah did not attend, but Stephen noted that the family was represented by George and Mary Vail, Sarah and her husband Dr. Silas C. Cutler and Dayton I. Canfield, Harriet Vail's former husband, and his new wife. The elder Vails met the wedding party when it returned to Speedwell that night. Next morning George was off to Philadelphia where he had recently become a partner in the locomotive firm of Baldwin, Vail and Hufty. Alfred and Jane were soon to follow, because George had hired his brother for his first full-time paid job. Stephen bought the newlyweds a house.

Alfred enjoyed his work in Philadelphia, but George did not. While Alfred wrote his brother that "I receive the very best of treatment," George complained about his partner Matthew Baldwin: "I am sick of the man . . .You may get along with him; I can do better that be with him." Despite Alfred's advice, George spent less and less time in Philadelphia and finally dissolved the partnership in 1842. It proved a blunder, as Baldwin Locomotive Works became a highly successful American industry.

Congressional Support

Alfred had never stopped thinking about the telegraph. Fortunately the bill to promote a test line was moving, if slowly, from committee hearings to Congressional action, On February 23, 1843, the telegraph bill passed the House - barely - by a vote of 89 to 83, with 70 members abstaining. However, on March 3, the Senate approved by a much more substantial margin. The $30,000 was appropriated for a 41-mile line between the Supreme Court Chamber in Washington and the Mount Clare Depot in Baltimore.

The Secretary of the Treasury appointed Morse as Superintendent and Dr. Leonard Gale and Alfred as Assistant Superintendents. Morse's salary was $2,000, Gale's was $1,500, and Alfred's $1,000, later raised to $1,400. On March 31, Morse wrote Alfred the news of his appointment and included this little reminder:

It is understood that your whole time and services are to be devoted the the experiments and the results of all discoveries made by yourself while thus employed, are to ensure to the benefit exclusively of the Proprietors of the Telegraph.

Although construction of the line did not begin for six months, Alfred was hard at work. He made drawings for a new recorder and a "correspondent" or Key, which replaced the original transmitter. He built one of the first self-interrupting circuit-breakers invented the axial magnet, and worked out a gauge for determining a battery's power-the modern ampere meter.

Difficulties during the construction delayed the opening of the line for over a year. Professor Gale dropped out of the project. At one point, Alfred saved the project from bankruptcy. The original plan called for the wires, encased in pipes, to be buried underground. However, after nine miles of pipe and $23,000 of the appropriation had been used up, Alfred discovered the wires were defective due to faulty insulation. Recalling an English article he had read, Alfred persuaded Morse that the wires should be strung on poles. In mid-March 1844, the first lines were hung along the tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. One set of instruments was left at the Capitol for Morse to operate. Alfred transported the other from place to place along the route, At the end of the month the line was in operation between Annapolis Junction and Washington. On May 1, Vail telegraphed the Whig's nomination of Henry Clay for President and Theodore Frelinghuysen for Vice President, sending the news to Washington an hour before it arrive by rail. Finally, on May 23, the wire reached their destination in Baltimore.

On May 24, the line was officially opened with formal ceremonies in the Supreme Court chamber in Washington. More sent the Biblical phrase "What Hath God Wrought," chosen by Annie Ellsworth, young daughter of the Patent Commissioner, while Alfred waited for the impulses to travel as dots and dashes over the long wires to Baltimore. The recorders in use were a new design. Compact and serviceable in shape, these machines were constructed in Washington, incorporating Alfred's idea for recording by using the indentations of a steel point on paper, working in combination with a grooved roller. Gone forever was the pen with ink that splotched and needed constant refilling, in many was as annoying as the lead pencil. Alfred attached a note to the base of his instrument in Baltimore stating that he was "the sole and only inventor of this mode of telegraph embossed writing."

Morse had always insisted on a permanent record. Shortly after the opening of the first line, however, Alfred began to decode by ear. Eventually the receiver merely produced amplified clicks, the length of the intervals between them determining dots and dashes.

Between December 19, 1843 and August 19, 1844, Alfred conducted 58 numbered experiments and several unnumbered ones. He was as "busy as a bee in a tar barrel!" he wrote George. He experimented successfully with operating both sending and receiving circuits with the same battery, a discovery that doubles the speed of line construction. Shortly thereafter, he made a series of experiments to determine the minimum power necessary. Using a copper plate in Washington and a zinc plate in Baltimore with a single connecting line, he proved that the ground itself was a good conductor and that a battery was not needed at all! He also constructed a simple circuit closer in the form of a spring finger key. This key made the complex transmitters obsolete. In other experiments, he discovered that electricity would cross broad rivers like the Potomac and Susquehanna. What a tremendous change had occurred in the Morse machine after Alfred became a partner. Almost all the machinery had undergone drastic revision or replacement by the time it was put into public use. Morse's very impractical toy had been converted into the first practical application of electricity.

Commercial Success

In early 1845, Morse and Alfred waited in vain for a Congressional act to extend the experimental line from Baltimore to New York. The Post Office Department, now under Cave Johnson, took over the telegraph in March 1845, but in 1846 Congress voted to allow lines to be sold or leased to private companies. Thus the door was open for speculators sensing huge financial rewards, who fought each other for choice routes. "Fog" Smith proved to be one of these. In self-defense, Morse, Alfred and Gale turned over their right to the management of the shrewd politician Amos Kendall. With ambitions of his own, Smith refused. However, for a time Kendall's skillful diplomacy with Smith made a tenuous union possible that led to the formation of the Magnetic Telegraph Company. Soon private lines were criss-crossing the country just as Alfred had predicted.

In 1845, Alfred published "The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, With the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known Employing Electricity of Galvanism, illustrated with 81 wood engravings." Proof of its importance is that is was placed in the cornerstone of the Washington Monument on July 4, 1848.

This book is both enlightening about the telegraph and totally exasperating to the reader seeking the full truth about Alfred's contribution. It should have dispelled forever any doubts of Alfred's deep scientific knowledge and superior mechanical abilities, However, it also perpetuated the myth about Morse's invention. Alfred did not even credit himself with the embossed writing method. The one accomplishment Alfred claimed for himself was the never-constructed 1837 Electro Magnetic Printing Telegraph. As a result, the only way that historians and researchers have been able to prove Alfred's substantial contributions has been through the diaries, memorandums and letter that became available after his death.

Alfred continued to make significant improvements until 1849. These included and 1848 register and the first use of gutta-percha as a insulator. Morse had left Washington in 1844. Alfred had replaced him there, sending Henry Rogers, whom he had trained, to Baltimore. Alfred became Chief Operator of the Magnetic Telegraph Company in 1847. He was recognized as the man knowing most about all phases of the telegraph. In early 1849 he published The Register of Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Companies using Morse's Patent with the Rates of Charges. He was called upon to assist in the installation of new lines, work on machinery and find the source of problems.

Alfred Vail Retires

In July 1849, however, Alfred left Washington and work on the telegraph forever and returned to Speedwell, severely weakened by his exertions and fearful of a cholera epidemic sweeping the South. "I have to leave the telegraph to take care of itself." he wrote, "since it cannot take care of me."

There is no doubt about it. Alfred Vail's contributions were deliberately suppressed, his reputation was submerged, and he was a party to it. Why?

In March 1848, Alfred had written in his Journal:

Prof. Morse is making a new specification of his invention. I think I shall take out a patent for my pen key, disconnecting key; my compound receiving magnet with circular armature and circular back piece combinations for connecting and disconnecting the grooved roller upon pilots; my new accommodating paper reel; improvement in the form of zinc, lightning protector; horizontal register magnet.

In July 1854, in Morristown where he had the time but perhaps not the health, Alfred wrote:

If ever I write the history of the Tel. I shall do it honestly and it will appear what service I have done to the whole concern.

Yet he neither applied for the patent nor wrote the story.

Alfred evidently felt that the 1837 agreement barred him from patenting any new inventions connected with the telegraph and other patentees did nothing to dissuade him. Speaking of his recorder, he wrote to Amos Kendall:

Whatever Mr. Smith or Dr. Gale or myself should invent or discover, going to simplify or improve Morris's Telegraph would belong to all jointly and became a part of the original invention. I could not there have taken out a patent for the invention for myself.

He also wrote that he wished "to preserve the peaceful unity of the invention."

It also seems likely that George, whose money had been spent and not yet repaid, controlled Alfred's actions. He wrote to Alfred:

I saw Prof. Morse when in New York, I made up my mind that we could get nothing without his friendship and influence . . . Therefore I would recommend every possible concession to him except in new discoveries which you should now keep secret.

A few days later, George wrote Alfred again:

I regret extremely that Prof. M. will hesitate for a moment to grant what belongs to us . . . Many claim for you all the honor but the original idea but don't you claim it until our slice is in our hands securely. The important discoveries are to be kept aloof from the public.

When George suspected that Alfred was considering patenting on his own, he wrote Stephen that "Alfred must not claim now, what he did not when the patent was taken out." Perhaps there was nothing else to be done. The Vails were caught in a seemingly hopeless dilemma because of a contract with no clear rights and a partner reluctant to share fame.

"It seemed to me that Morse's character has been wrongly estimated," observed a most unhappy Baxter, who had trouble forgiving George also.

Certainly the differences in personality between Morse and Alfred played a part. Alfred had once written that though Morse was "rather domineering and I resisting, still we get along very well." Morse wanted to be the lion of the hour and he was obviously good at it. He sought influential friends and needed to feel all ideas originated with him. He could make sure these ideas reach the public not only from himself but through his Journal of Commerce and his two brother's New York Observer. Alfred, on the other hand, was retiring and thoughtful, uneasy as a public figure,. Baxter wrote:

Vail was modest, amiable and unselfish willing . . . to labor in the cause of science for the love of science and from a feeling of genuine loyalty for his friend.

Alfred was not the only one caught by Morse's ambitions. So was Gale, who left the partnership in 1845. In fact, Morse quarreled with all the people he associated with in connection with the telegraph, including Gale, Henry Smith, and Patent Commissioner Ellsworth, who did a great deal for him. Alfred was the only one who remained loyal.

Conclusion

What if Alfred had been a different person? What if Alfred had stopped working on the telegraph after he had finished the model Morse took to Europe? What if he had followed George's advice and kept all his invention secret until the last patent re-issue expired and Alfred could take out his own patent? Atlas, by the time Alfred would have been dead.

It is fascinating that a friendship between the Vails and Morse survived. Alfred backed Morse's claims in the many lawsuits against the telegraph patent, and there were cordial letters between the two men on the subject. Alfred willed to Morse a box of 18 pieces of memorabilia, including his spring key. When Alfred's "Beloved Jeanie" died, he wrote Morse hoping he would design a suitable monument for his wife. When Stephen died, George invited Morse to be a pallbearer. There is not record he did either, but these requests indicate a continuing regard - perhaps a kind of awe - for this strange but apparently captivating man.

Nor did all of Alfred's work and loyalty bring him financial reward; he died a poor man. As new lines opened, they paid the patentees in stock. Shareholders like Morse, who could afford to wait, saw the value of their shares soar. Alfred, on the other hand, always in need of cash to support his wife and children, had to sell while the shares were still greatly undervalued. Although he telegraph was perfected by his death in 1859, the Civil War was the ultimate demonstration of its potential, while America's westward expansion proved it was commercial value - and resulted in the highly profitable Western Union.

Alfred once wrote of his situation:

I do not seek renown for myself, I care little for the world's applause ... But what I do desire is truth, in relation to the history of the improvements of the Magnetic Telegraph . . . as may be equivalent to the risk I have run, the interest I have shown, and the improvement I have made in the enterprise.

It was a cause to which Alfred's three sons and his second wife, Amanda, devoted themselves tirelessly after his death. It was not made easier by Alfred's public reticence to the end and Morse's continued long lifetime of credit-taking. In June 1874, Morse was invited to speak at a testimonial at the New York Academy of Music in connection with the unveiling of his statue in Central Park. He borrowed from Amanda Vail the 1844 recorder Alfred had invented and placed it beside him on the stage. Yet he did not mention it. According to The Presbyterian, this was all he had to say about Alfred and the telegraph:

It found a friend - an efficient friend - in Mr. Alfred Vail of New Jersey, who with his father and brother furnished the means to give the child a decent dress, preparatory to its visit to the seat of Government.

A highly indignant Amanda made a resolve to rescue Alfred's reputation. She had promised Morse that she would show none of Alfred's papers to anyone but himself - believing, as Alfred believed, that he would one day write the true story of the telegraph. But that afternoon she vowed to give Alfred's story to more trustworthy men.

After Morse's death in April 1872, things were no easier. In 1848, he had married a second time to a girl of 26, who although born deaf made him blissfully happy and the father of four more children, a total of nine. The ninth, Edward Lind Morse, edited his father's papers and lost no opportunity to downgrade Alfred. Every attempt for justice by a Vail was countered by a Morse trying to prove that Alfred was just a mechanic following orders. The Morse family commissioned a biography from Dr. Samuel Iraneous Prime of the Observer in which Alfred was ignored.

Four people began work on biographies of Alfred but death claimed all the authors before a book could be prepared! Without doubt, the strangest story surrounds "Fog" Smith. He had been asked to write a chapter which was suppressed. Smith, however, continued to work on a book about Alfred. When Smith died, the manuscript was discovered missing, and after some years his daughter concluded that a "drunken son and the female copyist" gave (sold?) the manuscript to a Morse family member or representative.

There was unforgivable official behavior, too. At first, the Smithsonian ignored Alfred's contributions. When the Morse family objected, officials removed a medallion of Alfred that was to have hung next to one of Morse on a frieze around the Electrical Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893. Statues of Alfred proposed for Washington and Morristown were never completed because of bickering among rivals.

Fortunately, there were those willing to see Alfred recognized. Amos Kendall, who knew both Morse and Alfred well, said:

If justice be done, the name of Alfred Vail will forever stand associated with that of Samuel F . B. Morse in the history and introduction into public use of the electro-magnetic telegraph.

There were a number of favorable newspaper and magazine articles, especially after Morse's death. Alfred's sons, Stephen and J. Cummings Vail, published articles and remembrances based on private papers. Uncle William P. Vail discussed Alfred extensively in his family genealogy.

Amanda considered her resolve achieved when an article appeared in the Century magazine of April 1888 written by Franklin L. Pope of the Franklin Institute where Alfred and Morse had demonstrated years before. She was further delighted with his comments in letters to her. "I find much from other sources confirming the view . . . that the universal telegraphic system today is in fact based upon the work of Mr. Vail, rather than upon Mr. Morse," In another letter he remarked, "It is indeed 'time that truth is the daughter of time.' The time will come when Mr. Vail will be recognized by all,"

In another article some years later, Pope raised the tantalizing question of who invented the dot-and-dash alphabet known as the "Morse Code" and concluded that it was Alfred. "The grandeur of Vail's conception of an alphabetic code . . has never met with the appreciation it deserves." Alfred's uncle William P. Vail, wrote Pope:

It was so understood by all who were admitted to this intimacy. In a conversation with him before his death in 1859, he so assured me. I am not aware that Mr. Morse ever set up an adverse claim.

William Baxter gave this direct evidence:

He brought me one day [late in 1837] after working an hour at his drawing, a sketch in which the lever was given an up-and-down movement . . . and for the first time we had a mechanism capable of making dots, dashes and spaces. Alfred's brain was at this time working a high pressure and evolving new ideas every day. He saw in these new characters the elements of an alphabet, which would transmit language in the form of works and sentences and he set about the construction of such an alphabet.

Still, nowhere in Alfred's papers does he claim this. George explained that Morse had asked him not to. In fact, in Alfred's 1845 book he specifically writes that Morse invented it in 1832 on the packet Sully although it took "13 years" and "many plans" to bring the alphabet to its simplest form. The 1832 date is hard to believe. Why then would Morse have clung to his dictionary and made it such an important part of the patent? Why did he use the numerical code as late as the demonstration in Washington in 1838?

One person wanted the world to have no doubt about the authorship. In 1911, in the dark of night, someone -- a grandson, it is believed -- engraved on Alfred's monument at St. Peter's Church, Morristown, these words:

Acknowledgements At Speedwell in the Nineteenth Century by Cam Cavanaugh, Barbara Hoskins, and Frances D. Pingeon This book was generously funded by a grant from the Carolyn R. Foster Fund of the Joint Free Public Library of Morristown and Morris Township and a gift from Mr. John H. Culbertson copyright The Speedwell Village 1981