Polymath’s progress

Kenneth Silverman’s excellent biography of Samuel Finley Breese Morse is a captivating tale of an accomplished portrait painter turned inventor of the telegraph. The privileged Finley, as he was called in his youth, was born in 1791 to the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, Mass. -- who would neglect his ministry in favor of a career in geography -- and the granddaughter of the president of Princeton, for whom he was named. Finley was not a dedicated student, but like his father before him, the young Morse attended Yale, where he developed interests in science, literature and art. It was the last to which he was most attracted, and he was determined to become an artist in a young America where paintbrushes and other basic tools of the trade were not easy to come by.

Finley prevailed upon his father, whose geography books sold well, to allow him to study under the emerging American painter Washington Allston, who himself studied in London. Finley followed Allston back to London, where he spent several years learning to paint. His ambition was to become “a successful history painter” in the tradition of Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, and “to be enlisted in the constellation of genius” he saw rising in America. His parents’ patience and support grew thin, however, for they saw no future in such a career, and he returned home to paint portraits to earn enough money to pursue his true love.

He also began to consider marriage and family, which turned his thoughts to a steady income. Toward that end, he “tried invention,” as did so many other 19th century Americans. But before the fickle Finley could strike it rich with a clever new gadget, he announced his plans for a new profession -- divinity -- for which he would abandon art. His artistic temperament did not suit him well for the ministry, however, and he soon went off to South Carolina, where he resumed painting portraits for money in Charleston. He also tried to do so in New England to be closer to his family. During his travels, he conceived of a grand painting of the U.S. House of Representatives that would include portraits of all its members. His idea was to charge admission to view the painting and thereby earn a living painting history. The public did not subscribe to the idea, though, and Finley began looking again for an alternative -- and more profitable -- career.

He briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a sculptor, aided by his invention of a marble-cutting lathe that could replicate statues and vases. But such a device had already been patented, so he abandoned the idea. In time, he tried another ambitious canvas, one depicting the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, complete with scores of famous paintings faithfully miniaturized by the artist. This too failed to attract crowds willing to pay for a view. He held out hope for a commission from Congress to paint one of the great canvases that was to be hung under the dome of the Capitol, but he never got the call. At age 41, he virtually resigned himself to a servile career painting portraits.

There was another side of Morse, as he was by then known. In 1832 he accepted an appointment as a professor of painting and sculpture at the fledgling New York University, which gave him a base of operations in that city. As a professor, he began to write and lecture -- not only on art. His politics were fiercely nationalistic. His European experiences had left him obsessively anti-Catholic, and he was also to become anti-immigrant and anti-abolitionist. His strong opinions led him into politics and to unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of New York City and for Congress. He was more successful as the president of the National Academy of Design, but his own artistic career essentially foundered.

Morse’s career took another turn in 1837, when he learned that a pair of Frenchmen was demonstrating a “revolutionary system of long-distance communication.” As Silverman reminds us, “News of Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 took as long to reach Washington as news of Alexander the Great’s victory at the Battle of Arbela took to reach his capital in 331 B.C.” Morse saw immediately the implications since he had been working on such a device for five years, though few had been permitted to see the wires he had strung around his apartment or to view the telegraph apparatus he had created to send coded messages through them.

Morse maintained that the French device was not an electric telegraph so much as an improvement on the optical signaling system that had been operating in France even in the previous century. With other reports from Europe of devices that approached his singular system, Morse was thus determined to establish the priority of his invention. The genesis of his electric telegraph had taken place aboard the ship Sully during a transatlantic crossing in 1832, and he wrote to the captain and his fellow passengers seeking confirmation. However, one passenger, Boston physician and geologist Dr. Charles Jackson, claimed that the telegraph was their “mutual discovery.” Morse disputed Jackson’s claim and applied to the U.S. Commissioner of Patents for a document that established priority in advance of a formal patent.

The first public demonstration of Morse’s telegraph took place on Sept. 2, 1837, when a signal passed along 1,700 feet of wire strung back and forth in a long lecture room at New York University. At the same time, the federal government was exploring the possibility of establishing an optical telegraph system, and Morse pointed out the superior nature of his electric system. To demonstrate its efficacy over very great distances, Morse enlisted the help of Leonard Gale, a professor of chemistry who knew batteries, and engaged Alfred Vail, a recent NYU graduate who had witnessed the demonstration and had invaluable practical experience from working in his family’s foundry and machine shop. With their assistance, a telegraphic signal was sent over increasingly longer distances, culminating eventually in a government-sponsored line between Washington and Baltimore that officially opened May 24, 1844. Morse invited the patent commissioner’s daughter, Annie Ellsworth, in whom he was said to be interested romantically, to compose the first message. Consultation with her mother resulted in the now famous exclamation, “What hath God wrought!”

The instantaneous messaging characteristic of the telegraph led to its being called the “Lightning Line” and its inventor the “Lightning Man.” Hence the book’s title. The subtitle, “The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse,” refers not only to the fights with Jackson, Vail and many others over credit for and profit from the telegraph -- which continued throughout Morse’s life -- but also to his abandoned career as an artist, his neglected family life, his sadness over what his children became or did not become, and his bigoted religious and political beliefs. His was a life of grand scope, with heroic highs and tragic lows, now told brilliantly by Silverman.

The book is thoughtfully illustrated with many good-sized, well-reproduced examples of Morse’s paintings, including two-page spreads of his most ambitious canvases, “The House of Representatives” and “The Grand Gallery of the Louvre.” Unfortunately, there are relatively few diagrams of Morse’s telegraphic apparatus or the principles on which his invention was based. But this is appropriate for a biography of an artist-inventor that is not intended to be a history of technology. “Lightning Man” is already a long book, but it is one of those long books that a reader wishes were still longer.