Morse's patent : full exposure of Dr. Chas. T. Jackson's pretensions to the invention of the American electro-magnetic telegraph / by Amos Kendall.

  • Amos Kendall
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Morse's patent : full exposure of Dr. Chas. T. Jackson's pretensions to the invention of the American electro-magnetic telegraph / by Amos Kendall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    17/64
    the telegraph. Will you please give your opinion of the correct- ness of the above statements 1 Here he re-instates the electric spark omitted in his letter toS. E. Morse, and not only clings to the electro magnet, but speaks of the lever beam motion—the electro magnet to move a lever beam—as one of the processes which were simple and famil- iar experiments to him. Now, in his letter of 7th November, 1837, to Prof. Morse, he says: I have proof enough to show that I had produced a lever beam motion with mine (electro magnet) for that purpose, as long ago as the spring of 1834, &c. And this is reiterated with ad- ditions, in his recent depositions. In the spurious copy of the same letter, dated November 5th, 1837, set. forth in his Boston deposition, Dr. Jackson states the same incident more in detail, as follows, viz: I have furthermore, since my return to Boston, made more re- markable improvements with an electro magnet which 1 brought home from Paris in the Sully, (1832,) when 1 had the pleasure of your company. In 1834, 1 produced with that instrument a lever beam motion, which was shown to many of my scientific friends; and by that instrument I proposed to print my letters in actual types. So, the only remarkable improvement worthy of particular notice, made by Dr. Jackson, after his return to Boston, was the production of this lever beam motion in 1834, a process which he tells Mr. Rives in 1839 was perfectly familiar to him in 1832! ]t is worthy of note, however, that in none of Jackson's letters of 1837 or 1839 was there any allusion to marking with a steel point. That seems to have been a more recent discovery! Mr. Rives did not think Dr. Jackson's letter of June 14th, 1S39, worthy of an answer, and the unfortunate claimant of other peo- ple's inventions seems to have given up in despair. Morse took out his patent in 1840 without opposition, and for seven years thereafter this disinterested man of science, who had conceived it so much his duty to put down false claims, and give the world the gratuitous use of his invention, suffered Prof. Morse to im- nress on the Patent Office, on Congress, and on the world, the belief that he was the true inventor of the first recording tele- graph l But in 1847, he made another private effort to maintain his unfounded claims. He then appears to have become again pained not only that the French Philosophers,' but, the world in general accorded to Prof. Morse the invention of the recording Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, but that he was likely to derive some emolument from the invention. Under the false pretext, amon others, that Prof. Morse was writing letters to be used against him in the Ether controversy, he wrote to J. Francis