THE TELEGRAPH

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 418, 30 December 1932, Page 7

THE TELEGRAPH

| . MORSES WORK CHANCE REMARK LEADS TO DISCOYERY OF SYSTEM centenary'Last MONTH 3 (From a Correspondent). | 1 New York, Nov. 23. ? One hundred years ago this month | an American artist, whose work had been hung "on the line",at the Royal i Academy, was returning home: across I the Atlantic in the packet Snlly. He ! pondered over a conversation at din- | ner about recent discoveries in elec- | tro-magnetism. A Boston scientist I remarked that electricity was now \ passing instantaneously ovet any 1 length of wire. | 'The artist interjected: "If the 1 presence of 'electricity can be made | visible in any part of the circuit, I | see no reason why intelligence may 6 not be transmitted instantaneously 1 by electricity." S The remark passed unnoticed. What | should a painter be expected to know , | of electricity, the world's greatest 1 wonder? 3 He paced the deck alone, in deep' jj thought. Leaning on the rail, he | made some pencil drawings in his 2 sketch book. | "Well, Captain," he remarked, as | he left the ship at New York, "should | you hear of the telegraph, one of | these days, remember the discovery | was made on board the good ship | Sully." | Centenary Conversations I One hundred years later, the artist- | ! Samuel Fihley Breese Morse, and his | i conversation on the lowly packet boat i are being fittingly commemorated. | The President of the United States, j using a gold telegraph key, opened a 3 radio programme at one side of the I Atlantic. On the other, in Paris, the »j inventor's daughter spoke from Lon- j | don5 quoting the exact text of Morse's ' j reinark at dinner on the Sully. Yon | Siemens, whose father was associated .1 with Morse, spolce from Berlin. A 1 grand-daughter of Morse stool within the Capital of the United States, alongsisde the telegraph instrument 1 used by Morse when he tapped out the first massage, "What hath God wrought?" She quoted his famous . words, spoken in Paris before he left for Havre, to board the Sully: "The niails are too slow! If the lightning were used, it would be better to transmit intelligence." I A tense hush descended on countless listeners in two hemispheres as Marconi recalled a little-known, longforgotten incident in Morse's career, that the Wizard of Wireless must have pondered while experimenting with his own world-girdling force. River as Conductor "As a result of an accident, which 1 caused communication to be suddenly interrupted during one of his earlier experiments in telegraphing across a river, Morse devised a plan to arrange his wires along the banks of the river, and to cause the water itself to conduct the electricity across — a truly remarkable achievement of wireless through the water." Morse was in his 42nd year when he gave the world the telegraph. But he had already become famous in the Old and New World. A year after he graduated at Yale, he went to England, and, three years later, he was exhibiting at the Academy, whose judges regarded his "Dying Hercules" as one of the outstanding canvases of the year. Returning home when the funds were low, he painted Lafayette, and the author of the Monroe Doc- : trine, and was founder and first President of the American National Aca- j demy. He was desperately poor when from 1832 to 1835, he was perfect- I ing his invention. His first telegraph , instrument, a crude almost childish apparatus, had a lead pencil, suspend- j ed like a pendlum to makei the dots j and dashes. For five years he was j laughed at and abused while he persuaded Congress to vote 30,000 dollars to build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore — a paltry forty miles. Just before the clos- { ing of Congress, at midnight on 3rd 1 March, 1843, Moi'se crept down the [ gallery and trudged slowlv to his • lodging, broken by defear. At break- | fast next morning, a friend, who stayed to see Congress go into recess, told him his Bill had been passed in its dying moments. The rest is history.