rocess of formulating it
started in his mind a train of new and momentous ideas. The current
of electricity, he knew, would pass instantaneously any distance
along a wire; and if it were interrupted a spark would appear. It
now occurred to him that the spark might represent a part of speech,
either a letter or a number; the absence of the spark, another part;
and the duration of its absence, or of the spark itself, a third; so
that an alphabet might be easily formed, and words indicated. In a
few days he had completed rough drafts of the necessary apparatus,
which he displayed to his fellow-passengers. Five years later, the
captain of the ship identified under oath Morse's completed
instrument with that which Morse had explained on board the Sully,
in 1832.

During the twelve years that followed Morse was engaged in a painful
struggle to perfect his invention and secure for it a proper
presentation to the public. The refusal of the Government to
commission him to paint one of the great historical pictures in the
rotunda of the Capitol, seemed to destroy all his old artistic
ambition. In poverty he pursued his new enterprise, making his own
models, moulds, and castings, denying himself the common necessaries
of life, and encountering embarrassments and delays of the most
disheartening kind. It was not until 1836 that he completed any
apparatus that would work, his original idea having been
supplemented by his discovery, in 1835, of the "relay," by means of
which the electric current might be reinforced or renewed where it
became weak through distance from its source. Finally, on September
2, 1837, the instrument was exhibited to a few friends at his room
in the University building, New York, where a circuit of 1,700 feet
of copper wire had been set up, with such satisfactory results as to
awaken the practical interest of the Messrs. Vail, iron and brass
workers in New Jersey, who thenceforth became associated with Morse
in his undertaking.

Morse's petition for a patent was dated September 28, 1837, and was
soon followed by a petition to Congress for an appropriation to
defray the expense of subjecting the telegraph to actual experiment
over a length sufficient to establish its feasibility and
demonstrate its value. The Committee on Commerce, to whom the
petition was referred, reported favorably. Congress, however,
adjourned without making the appropriation, and meanwhile Morse
sailed for Europe to take out patents t