“Should the Emperor be desirous of the superintendence of an experienced person to put the Telegraph in operation in Russia, I will either engage myself to visit Russia for that purpose; or, if my own or another government shall, previous to receiving an answer from Russia, engage my personal attendance, I will send an experienced person in my stead.”

As a specimen of the vigorous style in which he repelled attacks on his merits as an inventor, I shall give the following:—­

Messrs. Editors,—­The London “Mechanics’ Magazine,” for October, 1844, copies an article from the Baltimore “American” in which my discovery in relation to causing electricity to cross rivers without wires is announced, and then in a note to his readers the editor of the magazine makes the following assertion:  “The English reader need scarcely be informed that Mr. Morse has in this, as in other matters relating to magneto telegraphs, only rediscovered what was previously well known in this country.”

More illiberality and deliberate injustice has been seldom condensed within so small a compass.  From the experience, however, that I, in common with many American scientific gentlemen, have already had of the piratical conjoined with the abusive propensity of a certain class of English savans and writers, I can scarcely expect either liberality or justice from the quarter whence this falsehood has issued.  But there is, fortunately, an appeal to my own countrymen, to the impartial and liberal-minded of Continental Europe, and the truly noble of England herself.

I claim to be the original inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph; to be the first who planned and operated a really practicable Electric Telegraph.  This is the broad claim I make in behalf of my country and myself before the world.  If I cannot substantiate this claim, if any other, to whatever country he belongs, can make out a previous or better claim, I will cheerfully yield him the palm.

Although I had planned and completed my Telegraph unconscious, until after my Telegraph was in operation, that even the words “Electric Telegraph” had ever been combined until I had combined them, I have now made myself familiar with, I believe, all the plans, abortive and otherwise, which have been given to the world since the time of Franklin, who was the first to suggest the possibility of using electricity as a means of transmitting intelligence.  With this knowledge, both of the various plans devised and the time when they were severally devised, I claim to be the first inventor of a really practicable telegraph on the electric principle.  When this shall be seriously called in question by any responsible name, I have the proof in readiness.

As to English electric telegraphs, the telegraph of Wheatstone and Cooke, called the Magnetic Needle Telegraph, inefficient as it is, was invented five years after mine, and the printing telegraph, so-called (the title to the invention of which is litigated by Wheatstone and Bain) was invented seven years after mine.