his proper field now,
for however great his abilities as an artist, he was possessed of genius
of a higher, more useful type, and it was henceforth his duty to employ
it. He thought long and earnestly upon the subject which the words of
his fellow-passenger had so freshly called up, pacing the deck under the
silent stars, and rocked in his wakeful berth by the ocean whose terrors
his genius was to tame, and whose vast depths his great invention was to
set at naught. He had long been convinced that electricity was to
furnish the means of rapid communication between distant points, of
which the world was so much in need; and the experiments which his new
acquaintance had witnessed in Paris removed from his mind the last doubt
of the feasibility of the scheme. Being of an eminently practical
character, he at once set to work to discover how this could be done,
and succeeded so well that before the "Sully" reached New York he had
conceived "not merely the idea of an electric telegraph, but of an
electro-magnetic and chemical recording telegraph, substantially and
essentially as it now exists," and had invented an alphabet of signs,
the same in all important respects as that now in use. "The testimony to
the paternity of the idea in Morse's mind, and to his acts and drawings
on board the ship, is ample. His own testimony is corroborated by all
the passengers (with a single exception), who testified with him before
the courts, and was considered conclusive by the judges; and the date of
1832 is therefore fixed by this evidence as the date of Morse's
conception, and realization also--so far as the drawings could embody
the conception--of the telegraph system which now bears his name."

But though invented in 1832, it was not until 1835 (during which time he
was engaged in the discharge of the duties of his professorship in the
University of the City of New York) that he was enabled to complete his
first recording instrument. This was but a poor, rude instrument, at the
best, and was very far from being equal to his perfected invention. It
embodied his idea, however, and was a good basis for subsequent
improvements. By its aid he was able to send signals from a given point
to the end of a wire half a mile in length, but as yet there was no
means of receiving them back again from the other extremity. He
continued to experiment on his invention, and made several improvements
in it. It was plain from the first that he needed a dupl