. It is used to convey intelligence not only by electricity,
but in many other ways. Its cabalistic characters can be read by the eye,
the ear, and the touch.

Just as the names of Ampere, Volta, and Watt have been used to designate
certain properties or things discovered by them, so the name of Morse is
immortalized in the alphabet invented by him. The telegraph operators all
over the world send "Morse" when they tick off the dots and dashes of the
alphabet, and happily I can prove that this is not an honor filched from
another.

It is a matter of record that Vail himself never claimed in any of his
letters or diaries (and these are voluminous) that he had anything to do
with the devising of this conventional alphabet, even with the
modification of the first form. On the other hand, in several letters to
Morse he refers to it as being Morse's. For instance, in a letter of
April 20, 1848, he uses the words "your system of marking, _lines_ and
_dots_, which you have patented." All the evidence brought forward by the
advocates of Vail is purely hearsay; he is said to have said that he
invented the alphabet.

Morse, however, always, in every one of his many written references to
the matter, speaks of it as "my conventional alphabet." In an article
which I contributed to the "Century Magazine" of March, 1912, I treated
this question at length and proved by documentary evidence that Morse
alone devised the dot-and-dash alphabet. It will not be necessary for me
to repeat all this evidence here; I shall simply give enough to prove
conclusively that the Morse Alphabet has not been misnamed.

The following is a fugitive note which was reproduced photographically in
the "Century" article:--

"Mr. Vail, in his work on the Telegraph, at p. 32, intimates that the
saw-teeth type for letters, as he has described them in the diagram (9),
were devised by me as early as the year 1832. Two of the elements of
these letters, indeed, were then devised, the dot and space, and used in
constructing the type for numerals, but, so far as my recollection now
serves me, it was not until I experimented with the first instrument in
1835 that I added the -- dash, which supplied me with the three elements
for combinations for letters. It was on noticing the fact that, when the
circuit was closed a longer time than was necessary to make a dot, there
was produced a line or dash, that, if I rightly remember, the broken
parts of a continuous line as t