and the palanquin, to be in turn followed by
the locomotive; and so the telegraph, as a means of rapidly communicating
intelligence between distant points, was the logical successor of the
signal fire and the semaphore.

In all of these improvements by man upon what man had before
accomplished, the pioneer was not only dependent upon what his
predecessors had achieved, but, in almost every case, was compelled to
call to his assistance other workers to whom could be confided some of
the minutiae which were essential to the successful launching of the new
enterprise.

I have shown conclusively that the idea of transmitting intelligence by
electricity was original with Morse in that he was unaware, until some
years after his first conception, that anyone else had ever thought of
it. I have also shown that he, unaided by others, invented and made with
his own hands a machine, rude though it may have been, which actually did
transmit and record intelligence by means of the electric current, and in
a manner entirely different from the method employed by others. But he
had now come to a point where knowledge of what others had accomplished
along the same line would greatly facilitate his labors, and when the
assistance of one more skilled in mechanical construction was a great
desideratum, and both of these essentials were at hand. It is quite
possible that he might have succeeded in working out the problem
absolutely unaided, just as a man might become a great painter without
instruction, without a knowledge of the accumulated wisdom of those who
preceded him, and without the assistance of the color-maker and the
manufacturer of brushes and canvas. But the artist is none the less a
genius because he listens to the counsels of his master, profits by the
experience of others, and purchases his supplies instead of grinding his
own colors and laboriously manufacturing his own canvas and brushes.

The three men to whom Morse was most indebted for material assistance in
his labors at this critical period were Professor Joseph Henry, Professor
Leonard D. Gale, and Alfred Vail, and it is my earnest desire to do full
justice to all of them. Unfortunately after the telegraph had become an
assured success, and even down to the present day, the claims of Morse
have been bitterly assailed, both by well-meaning persons and by the
unscrupulous who sought to break down his patent rights; and the names of
these three men were freely used i