e Russian contract, which
he was led to believe was perfectly certain, and the Czar's signature
simply a matter of form. While at the time, and probably for all his
life, Morse considered his failure in Europe as a cruel stroke of Fate,
we cannot but conclude, in the light of future developments, that here
again Fate was cruel in order to be kind. The invention, while it had
been pronounced a scientific success, and had been awarded the palm over
all other systems by the foremost scientists of the world, had yet to
undergo the baptism of fire on the field of battle. It had never been
tried over long distances in the open air, and many practical
modifications had yet to be made, the necessity for which could only be
ascertained during the actual construction of a commercial line. Morse's
first idea, adhered to by him until found by experience, in the building
of the first line between Washington and Baltimore, to be impracticable,
had been to bury the wires in a trench in the ground. I say it was found
to be impracticable, but that is true only of the conditions at that
early date. The inventor was here again ahead of his time, for the
underground system is now used in many cities, and may in time become
universal. However, we shall see, when the story of the building of that
first historic line is told, that in this respect, and in many others,
great difficulties were encountered and failure was averted only by the
ingenuity, the resourcefulness, and the quick-wittedness of the inventor
himself and his able assistants. Is it too much to suppose that, had the
Russian, or even the French, contract gone through, and had Morse been
compelled to recruit his assistants from the people of an alien land,
whose language he could neither speak nor thoroughly understand, the
result would have been a dismal failure, calling down only ridicule on
the head of the luckless inventor, and perhaps causing him to abandon the
whole enterprise, discouraged and disheartened?

Be this as it may, the European trip was considered a failure in a
practical sense, while having resulted in a personal triumph in so far as
the scientific elements of the invention were concerned. I shall,
therefore, give only occasional extracts from the letters, some of them
dealing with matters not in any way related to the telegraph.

He writes to Mr. Smith on February 18, 1839:--

"I have been wholly occupied for the last week in copying out the
correspondence a