a man of unusual
enterprise and ability. He determined to back his son in the
enterprise, and Morse was invited to come and exhibit his model. Two
thousand dollars was needed to make the necessary instruments and
secure the patents. On September 23, 1837, the agreement was drawn
up by the terms of which Alfred Vail was, at his own expense, to
construct apparatus suitable for exhibition to Congress and to secure
a patent. In return he was to receive a one-fourth interest. Very
shortly afterward they filed a caveat in the Patent Office, which is a
notice serving to protect an impending invention.

Alfred Vail immediately set to work on the apparatus, his only helper
being a fifteen-year-old apprentice boy named William Baxter. The
two worked early and late for many months in a secret room in the
iron-works, being forced to fashion every part for themselves. The
first machine was a copy of Morse's model, but Vail's native
ability as a mechanic and his own ingenuity enabled him to make many
improvements. The pencil fastened to the armature which had marked
zigzag lines on the moving paper was replaced by a fountain-pen which
inscribed long and short lines, and thus the dashes and dots of the
Morse code were put into their present form. Morse had worked out an
elaborate telegraphic code or dictionary, but a simpler code by which
combinations of dots and dashes were used to represent letters instead
of numbers in a code was now devised. Vail recognized the importance
of having the simplest combinations of dots and dashes stand for the
most used letters, as this would increase the speed of sending. He
began to figure out for himself the frequency with which the various
letters occur in the English language. Then he thought of the
combination of types in a type-case, and, going to a local newspaper
office, found the result all worked out for him. In each case of type
such common letters as _e_ and _t_ have many more types than little
used letters such as _q_ and _z_. By observing the number of types of
each letter provided, Vail was enabled to arrange them in the order of
their importance in assigning them symbols in the code. Thus the
Morse code was arranged as it stands to-day. Alfred Vail played a
very important part in the arrangement of the code as well as in the
construction of the apparatus, and there are many who believe that the
code should have been called the Vail code instead of the Morse code.

[Illustration: MOR