By Dave Jensen, W7DGJ

This history of invention is often a history recorded by those with the power to ensure it is recorded their way. It's unfortunate -- but true -- that over the years there have been many examples of those who have created the tools or the systems we use today, but whom you don't hear about. These folks are not always the lead story in the recorded history.

I've written about them in previous columns, whether it's Mahlon Loomis, radio wave experimenter working decades before Marconi's birth, or Clarence Tuska, co-founder of the ARRL who is now disappearing as a part of our collective ham radio history. Others might include Rufus Turner, the USA's first black radio amateur, a man who brought many innovations to the forefront in ham radio 100 years ago.

In those wild days of rapid electromechanical invention and the development of technologies such as the telephone, radio, electric lighting and more, there were big names associated with the work . . . names like Thomas Edison, as one example. Many articles have been written about the brilliant minds working on Edison's team, but all of the patents and recognition went to the master himself. Edison was a classic self-promoter.

This was also true of Samuel Morse, who I'll focus on in this issue. Whether you are a CW operator or not, the story behind this man and his inventions may be of great interest.

But was there another name we should be remembering with the same level of respect and admiration? I believe there was -- and that man was Alfred Vail.

Communication Via Wires and the Telegraph Key

Samuel Morse was an interesting fellow but also a total contradiction. He was a brilliant artist, a painter whose portaits and landscapes had what critics of the time called "a divine influence." (See his painting "The Galleries of the Louvre" below). His brilliance allowed him to pursue both art as well as engineering, which is an unusual combination.

And yet, Morse was an ardent supporter of slavery. While times were different then -- sensibilities not what they are today -- he went so far as to write editorials in support of slave owners as if they had a God-given right to hold humans in bondage. He was also a leader in the "anti-papist" movement that proposed limiting immigration into the USA from Catholic countries, as he was certain the Catholic Church had instituted a plan to take over America. While these things bothered me a great deal as I read about the man, a ham friend reminded me how different the human race was in the mid-1800's. I'll give Morse a pass as his contributions to society proved to be critical to our progress.

What's most important is that the man had the huge curiosity required of an inventor and an inherent drive to make his mark in history. Despite the fact that there were others working on the idea of long-distance communication via wire, he became enamored with the idea of an inexpensive one-wire system. In France, a working telegraph had been demonstrated as early as 1798, and in the early 1930's there were nearly 60 others around the world experimenting with multiple wire systems. It was 1832 when Morse first conceptualized his designs at age 41, which included the electro-mechanical elements of a device that would send numerical codes, each of which represented a word in the dictionary that he would later create.

It was a complicated system -- one that would need huge improvements to be commercially viable.

Alfred Vail Enters the Scene

Alfred Vail came from an affluent family in Morris County, New Jersey. The Vails had owned Speedwell Ironworks for years, quite successfully serving customers in New York and New Jersey. Alfred, a skilled machinist working for the family business, happened to be visiting New York University one day when he came across an experiment being conducted by Professor Samuel Morse. The two men hit if off and Vail stayed all day with the older fellow, discussing ways that the Morse telegraph could be improved.

Alfred immediately saw the potential for improvement in the machined tool that would be the driver of communication across the telegraph wire (which became known as the "sounding key"). The two men spoke about a financial arrangement and an agreement was struck . . . All of the technologies that were developed by Alfred Vail in his work with Morse would belong exclusively to the Professor, but a cut of the commercial profits would go to the Vail family. Alfred's responsibility would be to fine-tune the mechanical aspects of the device and to finance the patent application process in both America and Europe. The young man's father gave him financial backing for this purpose and the use of Speedwell Ironworks' R&D facilities to use in his off-hours. His politician brother, George Vail, also became involved on the business side. The family didn't realize it at the time, but that deal they made with Samuel Morse would result in a very lopsided and uncomfortable scenario for Alfred, who was never publicly recognized for his improvements.

Successful Refinements

The first system that was brought into Speedwell Ironworks showed Alfred and his assistant William Baxter how little that Morse knew about mechanical design and construction. They set about making some significant changes, attacking the low-hanging fruit first. As Baxter chronicled later, (thanks to Neal McEwen K5RW):

"As we became acquainted with Morse it became evident to us that his mechanical knowledge and skill were limited, and his ideas in matters relating to construction of little value. As the weak points in the apparatus were one after another developed, Alfred began to draw upon the resources of his own wonderful power of invention in substituting practical and commercially viable mechanical combinations for the more or less impracticable designs of Morse."

As he describes, the first piece of business was to improve the "sounding key," and the result (a replica photographed above) looked much more like the CW keys of today. Baxter tells us of the day Alfred brought him a new design to produce: 

"He brought a sketch of a new marking device, in which a vertical motion was given to the lever instead of the transverse movement which had hitherto been employed. We constructed the new lever, and thus for the first time produced a device capable of making dots, dashes, and spaces."

The Code Emerges

Baxter continues, "Alfred saw in these new characters the elements of an alphabetical code by which language could be transmitted in actual words and sentences [DGJ: as opposed to Morse's clunky numerals-to-dictionary approach] and he instantly set himself at work to construct such a code."

"His general plan was to employ the simplest and shortest combinations to represent the most frequently recurring letters of the English alphabet, and the remainder for the more infrequent ones. For instance, he found upon investigation that the letter 'e' occurs much more frequently than any other letter, and accordingly he assigned to it the shortest symbol, a single dot. On the other hand 'j' which occurs infrequently, is expressed by dot-dash-dash-dash. After going through a computation, in order to ascertain the relative frequency of the occurrence of different letters in the English alphabet, Alfred was seized with sudden inspiration and visited the office of the Morristown local newspaper, where be found the whole problem worked out for him in the type cases of the compositor there."

The Big Test - DC to Baltimore

The two inventors, Morse and Vail, had their opportunity on May 24, 1844 to demonstrate the electromagnetic telegraph to the US Government and press observers. 44 miles of wire had been strung between the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Congress and a location in Baltimore where Vail waited for those classic words, "What hath God Wrought." It was a success, and though this first telegraph line fell into disrepair, the industry that sprung up around the telegraph grew as fast or faster than did the railroads. By 1861, the transcontinental telegraph system was entrenched and news could move instantly from one coast to the other. 

To bring us back to my first few paragraphs about how sometimes the men and women who actually did the work don't get the credit, I believe that Morse should have allowed Vail's name to be on the patents. And as the code had nothing from Morse in it, it should perhaps have been called Vail Code. The big payday for Alfred Vail never took place. He was employed for a time running one of the major telegraph lines, but the annual salary paid by Morse was only $900 a year. Vail later dropped out of the telegraph business, and in a letter to Morse stated that he was leaving despite his decade of involvement with the telegraph, as it had made him a poor man and he needed an income.

To close, let me quote the authors of the book "The Story of the Telegraph" and their optimistic view of how the telegraph could change the world. It was written in the 1800's, but I'm a bit of a dreamer and I still believe that if we all had amateur radios, this prediction about the value of interconnection for the human species might just prove true:

"This binds us all together and by a vital cord connects all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should continue to exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between nations.” 

73 for now,

Dave Jensen W7DGJ

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