GIRDLING WORLD.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 24, 24 December 1932, Page 7

GIRDLING WORLD.

CENTENARY OF TELEGRAPH. ARTIST’S GREAT DISCOVERY. < One hundred years ago last month an American artist, whose work had been hung “on the line” at the Royal Academy, was returning home across the Atlantic in the packet Sully. He pondered over a conversation at dinner about recent discoveries in electro-mag-netism. A Boston scientist remarked that electricity was now passing instantaneously over any length of wire. The artist interjected: “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 remark passed unnoticed. What should a painter be expected to know of electricity, the world’s greatest wonder? The artist paced the deck alone, in deep thought. Leaning on the rail he made some pencil drawings in his 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 hoard the good ship Sully” (writes a New York correspondent). One hundred years later the artist, Samuel Finley Breeso Morse, and his conversation on the lowly packet boat were fittingly commemorated. The President of the United States, using a gold telegraph key, opened a radio programme at one side of the Atlantic. On the other, in Paris, the inventor’s daughter spoke into the microphone. M. Marconi spoke from London, quoting the exact text of Mr Morse’s remark at dinner on the Sully. Von Siemans, whose father was associated with Mr Morse, spoke from Berlin. “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.” A grand-daughter of Mr Morse stood within the capital of the United States, alongside the telegraph instrument used by Mr Morse when he tapped out the first message, “What hath God worught?” She quoted his famous words, spoken in Paris before he left for Havre to board the Sully: “The mails are too slow! If the lightning were used it "houid be better to transmit intelligence.” A tense hush descended on countless listeners in two hemispheres as M. Marconi recalled a little-known, long-for-gotten incident in Mr Morse’s career that the Wizard of Wireless must have pondered while experimenting with his own world-girdling force. “As a result of an accident, which caused communication to be suddenly interrupted during ono of his earlier experiments in telegraphing across a river, Mr Morse devised a plan to arrange his wire along the banks of Tne river, and to cause the water itself to conduct the electricity across—a truly remarkable achievement of wireless through the water.” FIRST TELEGRAPH INSTRUMENT Mr Morse was in Iris 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 oxhibting at the Academy, whose judges regarded his “Dying Hercules” as one of the outstanding canvases of the year. Returning homo when funds were low, he painted Lafayette, and the author of the Monroe Doctrine, and was founder and first president of the American National Academy. He was desperately poor when, from 1832 to 1835, he was perfecting his invention. Mr Morse’s first telegrgph instrument a crude, almost childish apparatus, had a lead pencil, suspended by a pendulum, to make the dots and dashes. For five years he was laugliat and abused while he persuaded Congress to vote 30,000 dollars (about £6000) to build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore—a paltry 40 miles. Just before the closing of Congress, at midnight on March 3, 1843, Mr Morse crept down the gallery and trudged slowly to his lodging, broken by defeat. At breakfast next morning, a friend, who stayed to see Congress go into recess, told him that his Bill had been passed in its dying moments. The rest is history.