no risk in embarking in the
enterprise. And upon this I decided in my own mind to SINK OR SWIM WITH
IT.'

Young Vail applied to his father, who was a man of enterprise and
intelligence. He it was who forged the shaft of the Savannah, the first
steamship which crossed the Atlantic. Morse was invited to Speedwell
with his apparatus, that the judge might see it for himself, and the
question of a partnership was mooted. Two thousand dollars were required
to procure the patents and construct an instrument to bring before the
Congress. In spite of a financial depression, the judge was brave enough
to lend his assistance, and on September 23, 1837, an agreement was
signed between the inventor and Alfred Vail, by which the latter was to
construct, at his own expense, a model for exhibition to a Committee of
Congress, and to secure the necessary patents for the United States.
In return Vail was to receive one-fourth of the patent rights in that
country. Provision was made also to give Vail an interest in any foreign
patents he might furnish means to obtain. The American patent was
obtained by Morse on October 3, 1837. He had returned to New York, and
was engaged in the preparation of his dictionary.

For many months Alfred Vail worked in a secret room at the iron factory
making the new model, his only assistant being an apprentice of fifteen,
William Baxter, who subsequently designed the Baxter engine, and died
in 1885. When the workshop was rebuilt this room was preserved as
a memorial of the telegraph, for it was here that the true Morse
instrument, such as we know it, was constructed.

It must be remembered that in those days almost everything they wanted
had either to be made by themselves or appropriated to their purpose.
Their first battery was set up in a box of cherry-wood, parted into
cells, and lined with bees-wax; their insulated wire was that used by
milliners for giving outline to the 'sky-scraper' bonnets of that day.
The first machine made at Speedwell was a copy of that devised by Morse,
but as Vail grew more intimate with the subject his own ingenuity
came into play, and he soon improved on the original. The pencil was
discarded for a fountain pen, and the zig-zag signals for the short and
long lines now termed 'dots' and 'dashes.'

This important alteration led him to the 'Morse alphabet,' or code of
signals, by which a letter is transmitted as a group of short and long
jets, indicated as 'dots' and 'dashe