The Telegraph in America: Its Founders, Promoters and Noted Men. By James D. Reid. New York: Derby Brothers. 1879. Pp. 850. Price, cloth, $6.
When in June, 1871, a strong representation of the telegraph interest in America was assembled in New York City to attend the ceremony of unveiling the statue of Professor S. F. B. Morse, in the Central Park, an earnest desire was expressed by many to have the occasion and the man appropriately commemorated in a volume. The task of composing this memorial volume was imposed upon Mr. Reid, and the completed work is now published: but instead of its being simply a monument to the memory of Professor Morse, the work has been expanded to the proportions of a history of telegraphy in America.
In accordance with the original intention of the author, the volume contains a pretty full biography of Professor Morse, with an account of the progress of electrical science down to the year 1832, when he first conceived his idea of a recording electrical telegraph. Mr. Reid was an intimate friend of Morse, and reverently cherishes his memory; but in writing this account of his friend’s researches and inventions, he exhibits no desire to slur the merits or to belittle the labors of other workers in the same field. The story of Morse’s invention of the recording telegraph is told without rhetorical embellishment, but with the effectiveness of simple narrative. It was in the early part of October, 1832, and Morse was crossing the Atlantic on his way home from Europe, whither he had gone some three years before, to study the works of the great painters, for he was an artist before he turned his attention to telegraphy. One of his fellow travelers was Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, then profoundly interested in electro-magnetism, to which his attention had been directed by certain lectures which he had heard in Paris. In conversation with Morse he described in particular Ampère’s brilliant experiments with the electro-magnet.
"The subject," writes Mr. Reid, "at once excited very general interest, into which Mr. Morse entered with awakened enthusiasm. Hitherto he had felt no other interest in electrical matters than that of a lively and excited curiosity. His early studies now enabled him to enter into the conversation with intelligent earnestness. Dr. Jackson had in his trunk, in the hold of the vessel, an electro-magnet, which he described, and during the conversation alluded to the length of wire in the coils. This led one of the company to inquire ‘if the velocity of the electricity was retarded by the length of the wire.’ A very pregnant thought lay in that inquiry, and the conversation became earnest and practical. Dr. Jackson replied that electricity passed instantaneously over any known length of wire. At this point Mr. Morse remarked, ‘If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.’"
The author has had access to the artist’s sketch-book, in which Morse at the time jotted down his alphabet scheme, and drew designs of various pieces of apparatus. These are reproduced in Mr. Reid’s volume, and thus the reader is enabled to see Morse’s system of telegraphy in its germ, so to speak. The author follows his own account of the "Birth of the Recording Telegraph," with the history of the invention composed by Morse himself in 1868, on the occasion of the International Exposition at Paris.
This "Morse Memorial" occupies the first one hundred pages of Mr. Reid’s volume; the remainder is devoted to the "History of the Telegraph in America." The plan of this second part is an unfortunate one, comprising sketches of the rise and development of the different telegraph companies, with notices of their founders and promoters. This arrangement necessarily makes the work a congeries of mutually independent memoirs, each one valuable indeed in itself, but the effect of the whole must be to weary and confuse the reader’s mind. Nevertheless, the work is one possessing permanent value, not as a "History," but rather as a collection of mémoires pour servir—of authentic materials which the philosophical historian will later digest and coördinate. It is safe to say that no future historian of the telegraph can afford to overlook the work done by Mr. Reid.
The book, in its mechanical execution, leaves nothing to be desired. It contains portraits, some in steel plate, others in
