There is a great fallacy in the judgment of mankind about the method
of the coming of new things. People imagine that new things come all
at once, but they do not. Nothing comes all at once; that is, no
thing. In the facts of the natural world, that is, among visible
phenomena of the landscape, the judgment of people is soon corrected.
There it is seen that everything grows. The growth is sometimes slow
and sometimes rapid; but everything comes gradually out of its
antecedents. No tree or shrub or flower ever came immediately. No
living creature on the face of the earth begins by instantaneous
apparition. The chick gets out of its shell presently, but even that
takes time. Every living thing comes on by degrees from a germ, and
the germ is generally microscopic! Nature is, indeed, a marvel!
The facts of human life, whether tangible or intangible, have this
same method. For example, there has not been an invention known to
mankind that has not come on in the manner of growth. The antecedents
of it work on and on in a tentative way, producing first this trial
result and then that, always approaching the true thing; and even the
true thing when it comes is not perfect. It is made perfect afterward.
There was never an instantaneous invention, and there was never a
complete one! It is doubtful whether there is at the present time a
single complete, that is perfect or perfected, invention in the world.
They are all of partial development. They show in their history their
origin, their growth, their gradual approximation to the perfect form.
All of the marvelous contrivances which, fill the arena of our
civilization, making it first vital and then vocal, have come by the
evolutionary process. Every one of them has a history which is more
and more obscure as we follow it backward to its source. In every
case, however, there comes a time when a given discovery, manifesting
itself in a given invention, takes a sort of spectacular character,
and it is then rather suddenly revealed to the consciousness of
mankind.
Of this general law the telegraph affords a conspicuous example. The
whole world knows the story of the telegraph of Morse. It was in 1844
that the work of this great inventor was publicly demonstrated to the
world. Then it was that the electro-magnetic telegraph in its first
rude estate began to be used in the transmission of messages and other
written information.
It has come to pass that "telegraph" means virtually _electric_
telegraph. The people of to-day seem to have forgotten that the
telegraph is not necessarily dependent on the electrical current. They
have forgotten that back of the Morse invention other means had been
employed of transmitting information at a distance. They have
forgotten that it was by the most gradual and tedious process that the
old telegraphic methods were evolved into the new. Note with wonder
how this great invention began, and through what stages it passed to
completion.
There is a natural telegraphy. Whoever stands in an open place and
calls aloud to his fellow mortal at a distance _telegraphs_ to him. At
least he telephones to him; that is, _sounds_ to him at a distance.
The air is the medium, the vocal cords in vibration the source of the
utterance, and the ear of the one at a distance the audiphonic
receiver. This sort of telegraphy is original and natural with human
beings, and it is common to them and the lower animals. All the
creatures that have vocality use this method. It were hard to say how
humble is the creeping thing that does not rasp out some kind of a
message to its fellow insect. Some, like the fireflies, do their
telegraphing with a lantern which they carry. The very crickets are
expert in telegraphy, or telephony, which is ultimately the same
thing.
After transmitted sound the next thing is the visible signal, and this
has been employed by human beings from the earliest ages in
transmitting information to a distance. It is a method which will
perhaps never be wholly abandoned. Observe the surveyors running a
trial line. Far off is the chain bearer and here is the theodolite.
The man with the standard watches for the signal of the man with the
instrument. The language is _seen_ and the message understood, though
no word is spoken. Here the sunlight is the wire, and the visible
motion of the hands and arms the letters and words of the message.
The ancients were great users of this method. They employed it in both
peace and war. They occupied heights and showed signals at great
distances. The better vision of those days made it possible to catch a
signal, though far off, and to transmit it to some other station,
likewise far away. In this manner bright objects were waved by day and
torches by night. In times of invasion such a method of spreading
information has been used down to the present age. Nor may we fail to
note the improved apparatus for this kind of signaling now employed in
military operations. The soldiers on our frontiers in Arizona, New
Mexico, and through the mountainous regions further north, are able to
signal with a true telegraphic language to stations nearly a hundred
miles away.
Considerable progress was made in telegraphy in the after part of the
eighteenth century. This progress related to the transmission of
visible messages through the air. In the time of the French Revolution
such contrivance occupied the attention of military commanders and of
governing powers. A certain noted engineer named Chappe invented at
this epoch a telegraph that might be properly called successful.
Chappe was the son of the distinguished French astronomer, Jean Chappe
d'Auteroche, who died at San Lucar, California, in 1769. This elder
Chappe had previously made a journey into Siberia, and had seen from
that station the transit of Venus in 1761. Hoping to observe the
recurring transit, eight years afterward, he went to the coast of our
then almost unknown California, but died there as stated above.
The younger Chappe, being anxious to serve the Revolution, invented
his telegraph; but in doing so he subjected himself to the suspicions
of the more ignorant, and on one notable occasion was brought into a
strait place--both he and his invention. The story of this affair is
given by Carlyle in the second volume of his "French Revolution." One
knows not whether to smile or weep over the graphic account which the
crabbed philosopher gives of Chappe and his work in the following
extract:
"What, for example," says he, "is this that Engineer Chappe is doing
in the Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onward, they
say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, the assassinated
deputy; and still onward to the Heights of Ecouen and farther, he has
scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with elbow-joints
are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most rapid mysterious
manner! Citoyens ran up, suspicious. Yes, O Citoyens, we are
signaling; it is a device, this, worthy of the Republic; a thing for
what we will call far-writing without the aid of postbags; in Greek it
shall be named Telegraph. '_Telégraphê sacre_,' answers Citoyenism.
For writing to Traitors, to Austria?--and tears it down, Chappe had to
escape and get a new legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has
accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe; this his Far-writer, with
its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal; and lines
of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and elsewhither. On an
Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer having just written that
Condè Town has surrendered to us, we send from the Tuileries
Convention-Hall this response in the shape of a Decree: 'The name of
Condè is changed to _Nord-Libre_ (North Free). The Army of the North
ceases not to merit well of the country.' To the admiration of men!
For lo! in some half-hour, while the Convention yet debates, there
arrives this new answer: 'I inform thee (_Je t'annonce_), Citizen
President, that the Decree of Convention, ordering change of the name
Condè into North Free; and the other, declaring that the Army of the
North ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and
acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille to
forward them to North Free by express.' Signed, Chappe."
This successful telegraph of Engineer Chappe was not an electric
telegraph, but a sunlight telegraph. Is it in reality any more
wonderful to use the electrical wave in the transmission of
intelligible symbols than to use a wave of light? Such seems to have
been the opinion of mankind; and the coming of the electric telegraph
was long postponed. The invention was made by slow approaches. In our
country the notion has prevailed that Morse did all--that others did
nothing; but this notion is very erroneous.
We are not to suppose that the Chappe method of telegraphing became
extinct after its first successful work. Other references to what we
_suppose_ to be the same instrument are found in the literature of the
age. The wonder is that more was not written and more accomplished by
the agency of Chappe's invention. In the fall of the year 1800,
General Bonaparte, who had been in Egypt and the East, returned to
Europe and landed at Frejus on his way to Paris, with the dream of
universal dominion in his head. In the first volume of the _Memoirs of
Napoleon Bonaparte_, his secretary M. de Bourrienne, writing of the
return to France says:
"We arrived in Paris on the 24th Vendemiaire (the sixteenth of
October). As yet he (Napoleon) knew nothing of what was going on; for
he had seen neither his wife nor his brothers, who were looking for
him on the Burgundy Road. The news of our landing at Frejus had
reached Paris _by a_ _telegraphic despatch_. Madame Bonaparte, who
was dining with M. Gohier when that despatch was communicated to him,
as President of the Directory, immediately set off to meet her
husband," etc. We should be glad to know in what particular form that
"telegraphic despatch" was delivered! But such are Bourrienne's words!
To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an
unfamiliar sound. Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was
born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen
years. Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Göttingen, where he
passed nearly the whole of his life. In the early part of the century
he distinguished himself in astronomy and in other branches of
physical science. He then became interested in magnetic and electrical
phenomena, and in 1833, with the assistance of Wilhelm Eduard Weber,
one of his fellow-professors, who died in 1891, he erected at
Göttingen a magnetic observatory. There he began to experiment with
the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of
mankind.
The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that
the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions.
Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without
using iron--for iron is the great disturber--and from them Gauss
obtained his hint. Weber was also expert in the management of
magneto-electrical currents. Gauss, with the aid of his co-worker,
constructed a line of telegraph, and sent signals by the agency of the
magnetic current to a neighboring town. This was nearly ten years
before Morse had fully succeeded in like experimentation.
It appears that the German scientists regarded their telegraph as
simply the tangible expression or apparatus to illustrate scientific
facts and principles. It was for this reason, we presume, that no
further headway was made at Göttingen in the development of
telegraphy. It was also for the additional reason that men rarely or
never accept what is really the first demonstration and
exemplification of a new departure in scientific knowledge. Such is
the timidity of the human mind--such its conservative attachment to
the known thing and to the old method as against the new--that it
prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and
practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar
temple of the future.
Gauss and Weber were left with their scientific discovery; and,
indeed, Morse in the New World of practicality and quick adaptations,
was about to be rejected and cast out. The sorrows through which he
passed need not here be recounted. They are sufficiently sad and
sufficiently humiliating. His unavailing appeals to the American
Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are
somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century. But
his humiliation was extreme. Smart Congressmen, partisans, the
ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher
with contempt. A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his
favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally
supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress,
or rather in the early morning of the fourth of March, 1843, the
munificent appropriation of $30,000 was placed at his disposal for the
construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore.
The one thing was done. A new era of instantaneous communication
between men and communities at a distance the one from the other was
opened--an era which has proved to be an era of light and knowledge.
Nor may we conclude this sketch without noting the fact that, not a
few of the members of the House of Representatives who voted the
pittance for the construction of the first line of actual working
telegraph in the world, went home to their constituents and were
ignominiously beaten for re-election--this this for the slight
service which they had rendered to their country and the human race!
When in New York City, turn thou to the west out of Fifth avenue into
Twenty-second street, to the distance of, perhaps, ten rods, and there
on a little marble slab set in the wall of a house on the north side
of the street, read this curious epitaph:
"In this house lived Professor S.F.B, Morse for thirty years and
died!"