In the year 1827, Professor James Freeman Dana, of Columbia College, delivered a series of lectures on the subject of electricity at the New York Athenaeum.  Professor Dana was an enthusiast in the study of that science, which, at that time, was but in its infancy, and he foresaw great and beneficial results to mankind from this mysterious force when it should become more fully understood.

Morse, already familiar with the subject from his experiments with Professor Silliman in New Haven, took a deep interest in these lectures, and he and Professor Dana became warm friends.  The latter, on his side a great admirer of the fine arts, spent many hours in the studio of the artist, discussing with him the two subjects which were of absorbing interest to them both, art and electricity.  In this way Morse became perfectly familiar with the latest discoveries in electrical science, so that when, a few years later, his grand conception of a simple and practicable means of harnessing this mystic agent to the uses of mankind took form in his brain, it found a field already prepared to receive it.  I wish to lay particular emphasis on this point because, in later years, when his claims as an inventor were bitterly assailed in the courts and in scientific circles, it was asserted that he knew nothing whatever of the science of electricity at the time of his invention, and that all its essential features were suggested to him by others.

In the year 1828, Morse again changed his quarters, moving to a suite of rooms at No. 13 Murray Street, close to Broadway, for which he paid a “great rent,” $500, and on May 6 of that year he writes to his mother: 

“Ever since I left you at New Haven I have been over head and ears in arrangements of every kind.  It is the busiest time of the whole year as it regards the National Academy.  We have got through the arrangement of our exhibition and yesterday opened it to the guests of the Academy.  We had the first people in the city, ladies and gentlemen, thronging the room all day, and the voice of all seemed to be—­’It is the best exhibition of the kind that has been seen in the city.’

“I am now arranging my rooms; they are very fine ones.  I shall be through in a few days, and then I hope to be able to come up and see you, for I feel very anxious about you, my dear mother.  I do most sincerely sympathize with you in your troubles and long to come up and take some of the care and burden from you, and will do it as soon as my affairs here can be arranged so that I can leave them without serious detriment to them....  What a siege you must have had with your help, as it is most strangely called in New Haven.  I am too aristocratic for such doings as help would make those who live in New Haven endure.  Ardently as I am attached to New Haven the plague of help will probably always prevent my living there again, for I would not put up with ’the world turned upside down,’ and therefore should give offense to their helpinesses, and so lead a very uncomfortable life.”