WHOSE CODE

Jan 31, 2023

WHOSE CODE

Invention of the “electro magnetic telegraph” says a good deal about how new technologies are born. First, almost nothing of the first American telegraph was new. The idea had been worked on for almost a century. Several working models had been built, but none was a practical, reliable way for electricity to move information. Second, the binary code that would fundamentally change communication was a late development. That code was essential to the invention and would be its greatest legacy, but the man given credit for it did not understand its importance.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was a difficult man from a difficult family. His father Jedediah was a Congregationalist pastor and author of geography and travel books with sales that rivalled those of Noah Webster’s spelling books and the Bible in both Britain and the United States. He socialized with Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and French minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and set a standard his oldest son spent a lifetime struggling to match.

Finley—he was never called Samuel—had a younger brother Richard who suffered repeated bouts of depression and died relatively young of liver cancer. Morse’s oldest daughter Susan also had incapacitating depression, and her son Charles committed suicide. His namesake son was mentally incapacitated and was never able to live independently. Willie, a son from his second marriage, was briefly incarcerated for murder before joining Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. His son Arthur, also from the second marriage, either fell or jumped from a railroad platform and was crushed beneath a moving train.

Morse also suffered from repeated episodes of depression and seems never to have had a close friend. His business partners uniformly disliked him and several sued him.

Both Finley and his two brothers went to Yale where they thrived while he barely made it through. Although he was a poor student Morse could paint, and he earned pocket money selling portraits. He wanted to take up painting as a profession, but Jedediah insisted he apprentice at a bookstore. That lasted just three months before the younger Morse convinced his father to send him to London for three years to work with prominent American artist Washington Allston.

Morse’s father scraped together an $800 annual allowance and increased it to $1000 when the young man complained he could not afford fruit, new clothes, or even “nice dinners”. Jedediah offered to let him copyright his new American geography in London and keep the profits, but the aspiring artist considered the boredom of business and accounts beneath him. Even though it required going into debt, Morse’s father was badgered into funding still another year in London before Finley agreed to come home provided painting would be his only job. He wanted to create great historical paintings, but there was no market for those so he was forced to become an itinerant portrait painter at $15 a commission.

Besides art, Finley was open to other ways to become wealthy. He and his brother Sidney patented a water pump and promoted it for use in fire engines, but, as with the London copyrights, Morse had no interest in the mechanics of starting a business, so the invention went nowhere. He enrolled in an Episcopal seminary but only lasted there two months before going back to portrait painting. This time he went to Charleston where wealthy planters were willing to pay as much as $70 for one of his paintings, and he was briefly solvent for the first time.

Morse went back to New Hampshire in 1817 and married Lucretia Walker whom he called Lucrece. A worsening South Carolina economy and growing dissatisfaction with his generally unflattering portraits forced Morse back to New England where another try at grand historical art failed. In 1824 he took another shot at entrepreneurship with an attempted patent on a marble carving device. That too failed. He next tried to get an appointment as secretary to the newly appointed American ambassador to Mexico—another failure. He did win a commission for a commemorative portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, but when it was done critics were generally unimpressed.

While he was in New York working on the Lafayette portrait, Lucrece died giving birth to their third child. He left the children with relatives and stayed in New York where he was elected an Associate of the American Academy of Fine Arts. He promptly got in a dispute with the American Academy and started a rival National Academy of the Arts of Design.

In 1826, Finley’s mother wrote asking him to come home for a final visit with his rapidly dying father. He wrote back that he was too busy organizing an exhibit at his academy. Jedidiah died leaving his wife with a substantial debt, three unsuccessful sons, and Finley’s three children.

In 1830, Morse went back to Europe where he supported himself doing portraits and making copies of old masters. He stayed until 1832 before taking the steamship Sully from Le Havre for New York, a voyage that changed his life.

On returning to New York, Morse was named Professor of the Arts of Design at the new University of the City of New York (eventually renamed New York University). The position carried no pay except fees he was expected to collect from his students, but he did take the title Professor that he used the rest of his life. He also became vociferously anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant.

Morse had spent more than two decades unsuccessfully trying to use art to become as famous as his father,. It was time to change course, so he set to work on an idea he said came to him on the Sully.

Charles Jackson, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard trained physician, was on the Sully as well, and he and Morse spent their idle hours discussing how electricity might carry information. The idea was far from original. Three quarters of a century earlier, a Scotsman—probably Charles Morrison—anonymously published the idea of using static electricity from a Leyden jar sent through thirty-six wires each of which, when charged, could pick up a piece of paper with a letter printed on it. Charge the right wire and a letter appeared on the other end. It was never built, and the lack of adequate insulation would probably have prevented its working anyway, but a number of inventors in England and Europe started working on other ways to communicate with electricity. It is likely that Morse did not know about those efforts.

At any rate, when he got back to New York, Morse started building a model “telegraph” in his rooms at the university, an effort severely hampered by his lack of funds and a serious lack of mechanical ability.

It is worth going through his device in order to see which of the parts were original. There had to be an electric current and wires to carry the current from the battery to a receiver. He needed a mechanism to open and close the circuit since whether the current was on or off conveyed the information. There also had to be a way to receive the signal, and Morse, unlike the Europeans, wanted to make a record of the signal.

The battery was a simple voltaic cell, and the wires were copper. Neither was new. At the transmitting end, the wire was broken and each end could be dipped into one of two small containers of mercury joined by a wire. When the ends were in the air, the circuit was broken. When they dipped into the mercury, it was complete. The wire yoke was attached to a lever the other end of which had a metal ridge. Beneath that end of the lever was a notched stick that could be moved so the protruding parts moved the lever up and down. Pulses of electricity with a pattern determined by the notches were sent down the circuit. This “port-rule” was original.

At the receiving end, the pulses of electricity had to be turned into a mechanical force to create a record. That relied on the well-known fact that wrapping a wire around a soft iron bar turned it into a magnet when the wire carried a current. The magnetized bar swung a pendulum with a pencil on the other end. Beneath the pencil was a roll of paper tape moved by a clockwork mechanism. When the current flowed, the magnet moved the pendulum and pushed the pencil from side to side. The straight line on the paper jerked into a V. The series of V’s on the paper exactly mirrored the opening and closing of the circuit caused by the pattern of notches on the port-rule dragging across the lever. It took Morse five years to build this Rube Goldberg apparatus.

The final necessity—and the key one—was some way of turning the notches on the port-rule into words. It could generate numbers—for instance vv vvvv v is 241—but numbers were not words. Morse’s solution was a dictionary that grew to almost 30,000 entries in which each word was given a number. The dictionary took a great deal of work, and anyone using the telegraph would have to either memorize the numbers or look them up.

There were other problems. After five years work, the device would only carry a current thirty of forty feet before it degraded and the message was lost. Morse showed his telegraph to Leonard D. Gale, professor of chemistry at the university, who solved the problem. First he gave Morse a more powerful battery. Then he showed him how wrapping the iron bar more tightly made it a more efficient magnet. Morse’s tens of feet became hundreds, and, in 1837, he was able to mount a demonstration for a visiting Oxford professor using 1,700 feet of copper wire looped around the periphery of a large room at the university.

The demonstration was seen by Alfred Vail, one of Morse’s students who just happened by. Vail was captivated, and his enthusiasm changed the telegraph. The young man’s family owned the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. The foundry had built the shaft of the first steamship to cross the Atlantic and was turning out wheels, axles, and cranks for the rapidly growing United States railroad industry. Alfred’s father, Judge Steven Vail, had money, and the foundry had a machine shop.

In February 1837, a United States House of Representatives resolution requested that the Secretary of the Treasury look into a “system of telegraphs for the United States.” Here at last was a chance for Morse to become rich and famous if Vail and his family could help him build a good enough model to convince the powers in Washington he had the solution. Vail agreed to supply $2000 and his own mechanical expertise in return of one-fourth of the rights to the invention in the United States and half interest in any foreign patents he could obtain.

Vail, assisted by fifteen-year-old apprentice William Baxter, retired to a locked room at Speedwell and set to work. He used Gale’s battery. There was no source of insulated wire so he and Baxter bought all the copper milliner’s wire they could find. Even though the wire was popular for “skyscraper bonnets” and plentiful, they depleted the entire New York garment district supply and hand-wrapped it with cotton thread. Vail next fixed Morse’s register. He traded the pencil that required repeated sharpening with a fountain pen and later with a stylus that made dents in the paper rather than marks. He also made the pendulum swing in the same direction as the paper moved so the V’s turned into dots, dashes, and spaces.

Several days of demonstrations for President Martin Van Buren, his cabinet, and members of Congress began February 15. The test was a success; the House of Representatives Committee on Commerce asked for a full report on the invention and recommended a $30,000 appropriation for a fifty-mile trial line. Committee Chairman Francis O.J. Smith was so impressed he left Congress to become a partner in Morse’s venture. Unfortunately for Morse, Vail, and Smith the wheels of Congress grind slowly. It was 1843 before the money was allocated to build a line from Baltimore to Washington.

During those six years, Vail was not idle. The code was an issue. Morse had put an inordinate amount of time into his number-based dictionary, and he was loath to give it up. Who actually created the code that carries Morse’s name is a point of contention. In support of Morse’s claim biographer Kenneth Silverman cites a note from Vail to his father dated February 7, 1838: “Professor Morse has invented a new plan of an alphabet and has thrown aside the dictionaries.” But Vail went on to say Morse’s alternative was a “very imperfect” combination of dots and lines of different length, and, when a demonstration of it failed, Morse reverted to the number dictionary for the Washington demonstration. In a letter to Vail’s son, a former acquaintance said Alfred told him that the code “came to him like a flash” one day when he was in the offices of the New York Observer. Vail later wrote, “Soon after my connection with Professor Morse as copartner, and at the time I was constructing an instrument for exhibiting the advantages of his telegraphy to a committee of Congress, it occurred to me that a plan might be devised, by means of which letters of the alphabet could be employed in recording telegraphic messages.” His assistant supported that; as soon as Vail invented the register that could make dots and dashes instead of V’s, Baxter said he “saw in these new characters the element of an alphabetical code by which language could be telegraphically transmitted in actual words and sentences, and he instantly set himself at work to construct such a code.”

According to Baxter. Vail planned to have the most common letters have the shortest code; e was . and T _. Less used letters could have longer codes; Q was__._ for instance. Baxter said that, upon returning to Morristown, Vail went to the offices of the Democratic Banner and counted the number of letters in the typesetters’ cases assuming that the most common characters would be the ones most used and needing the shortest code.

Why did Vail not claim the code if he had invented it? In the first place, he never publicly claimed any of his improvements, assuming his contract with Morse prohibited his doing so. In addition, Morse’s attorney Amos Kendall warned Vail that any patent dispute might invalidate his contract and take away his interest in the company.

Regardless, Vail also invented a telegraphic key to replace the port-rule. That combined with the binary code made electrical transmission of messages practical. There was a wire from London to Paris in 1852. By 1855 there were 42,000 miles of wires in the United States alone. In August 1858, after a plethora of difficulties, the first trans-Atlantic message was sent by Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan. It took a few more years for a reliable cable to be laid, but it lasted until it was replaced by fiber optic cable in 1966. The United States military did not phase out Morse Code until the 1990’s, and the last ship-to-shore message in the code was sent in 1999.

Morse had done what good inventors do. Very little in his telegraph was really original; almost all the parts had been tried before. That said, with the help of Vail and others, he managed to pull the parts together and revolutionize communication. Printing had removed space as a limitation on the spread of information; the telegraph removed time.

It is unlikely that either Morse or Vail recognized it explicitly, but the pivotal element in electronic communication was the first binary code that allowed a simple on/off in a circuit to be converted into intelligence and recorded. By the late nineteenth century, wireless transmission and analog wave-based signals pushed binary coding aside, but that was temporary. Silicon chips and ASCII coding changed dots and dashes into 1’s and 0’s and binary code came roaring back.

Share The Changing Brain

The Changing Brain

WHOSE CODE

Discussion about this post