shed for want of means, and
means of so trifling a character too, that they who know how to ask
(which I do not) could obtain in a few hours.... As it is, although
everything is favourable, although I have no competition and no
opposition--on the contrary, although every member of Congress, so far
as I can learn, is favourable--yet I fear all will fail because I am
too poor to risk the trifling expense which my journey and residence
in Washington will occasion me. I WILL NOT RUN INTO DEBT, if I lose the
whole matter. So unless I have the means from some source, I shall be
compelled, however reluctantly, to leave it. No one call tell the days
and months of anxiety and labour I have had in perfecting my telegraphic
apparatus. For want of means I have been compelled to make with my own
hands (and to labour for weeks) a piece of mechanism which could be made
much better, and in a tenth part of the time, by a good mechanician,
thus wasting time--time which I cannot recall, and which seems
double-winged to me.

'"Hope deferred maketh the heart sick." It is true, and I have known
the full meaning of it. Nothing but the consciousness that I have an
invention which is to mark an era in human civilisation, and which is to
contribute to the happiness of millions, would have sustained me through
so many and such lengthened trials of patience in perfecting it.' Morse
did not invent for money or scientific reputation; he believed himself
the instrument of a great purpose.

During the summer of 1842 he insulated a wire two miles long with hempen
threads saturated with pitch-tar and surrounded with india-rubber. On
October 18, during bright moonlight, he submerged this wire in New York
Harbour, between Castle Garden and Governor's Island, by unreeling it
from a small boat rowed by a man. After signals had been sent through
it, the wire was cut by an anchor, and a portion of it carried off by
sailors. This appears to be the first experiment in signalling on a
subaqueous wire. It was repeated on a canal at Washington the following
December, and both are described in a letter to the Secretary of the
Treasury, December 23, 1844, in which Morse states his belief that
'telegraphic communication on the electro-magnetic plan may with
certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean. Startling as this
may now seem, I am confident the time will come when the project will be
realised.'

In December, 1842, the inventor made another effort to