he means of imprinting at a distance were
suggested to me; since the inequalities of long and short lines,
separated by long and short spaces, gave me all the variations or
combinations of long and short lines necessary to form the alphabet. The
date of the code complete must, therefore, be put at 1835, and not 1832,
although at the date of 1832 the principle of the code was _evolved_."

In addition to this being a definite claim in writing on the part of
Morse that he had devised an alphabetic code in 1836, two years before
Vail had ever heard of the telegraph, it is well to note his scrupulous
insistence on historical accuracy.

In a letter to Professor Gale, referring to reading by sound as well as
by sight, occur the following sentences. (Let me remark, by the way, that
it is interesting to note that Morse thus early recognized the
possibility of reading by sound, an honor which has been claimed for many
others.)

"Exactly at what time I recognized the adaptation of the difference in
the intervals in reading the _letters_ as well as the numerals, I have
now no means of fixing except in a general manner. It was, however,
almost immediately on the construction of the letters by dots and lines,
and this was some little time previous to your seeing the instrument.

"Soon after the first operation of the instrument in 1835, in which the
type for writing numbers were used, I not only conceived the letter type,
but made them from some leads used in the printing-office. I have still
quite a quantity of these type. They were used in Washington as well as
the type for numerals in the winter of 1837-38.

"In the earlier period of the invention it was a matter which experience
alone could determine whether the _numerical_ system, by means of a
numbered dictionary, or the alphabetic mode, by spelling of the words,
was the better. While I perceived some advantages in the alphabetic
system, especially in the writing of proper names, I at that time leaned
rather towards the _numerical_ mode under the impression that it would,
on the whole, be the more rapid. A very short experience, however, showed
the superiority of the alphabetic mode, and the big leaves of the
numbered dictionary, which cost me a world of labor, and which you,
perhaps, remember, were discarded and the alphabetic installed in its
stead." Perhaps the most conclusive evidence that Vail did not invent
this alphabet is contained in his own book on the "American