“An unforeseen obstacle was interposed which has rendered my patent in France of no avail to me.  By the French patent law at the time one who obtained a patent was obliged to put into operation his invention within two years from the issue of his patent, under the penalty of forfeiture if he does not comply with the law.  In pursuance of this requisition of the law I negotiated with the president (Turneysen) of the Saint-Germain Railroad Company to construct a line of my Telegraph on their road from Paris to Saint-Germain, a distance of about seven English miles.  The company was favorably disposed toward the project, but, upon application (as was necessary) to the Government for permission to have the Telegraph on their road, they received for answer that telegraphs were a government monopoly, and could not, therefore, be used for private purposes.  I thus found myself crushed between the conflicting forces of two opposing laws.”

This was, indeed, a crushing blow, and ended all hope of accomplishing anything in France, unless the Government should, in the short time still left to him, decide to take it up.  The letters home, during the remainder of his stay in Europe, are voluminous, but as they are, in the main, a repetition of experiences similar to those already recorded, it will not be necessary to give them in full.  He tells of the enthusiastic reception accorded to his invention by the savants, the high officials of the Government and the Englishmen of note then stopping in Paris.  He tells also of the exasperating delays to which he was subjected, and which finally compelled him to return home without having accomplished anything tangible.  He goes at length into his negotiations with the representative of the Czar, Baron Meyendorf, from which he entertained so many hopes, hopes which were destined in the end to be blasted, because the Czar refused to put his signature to the contract, his objection being that “Malevolence can easily interrupt the communication.”  This was a terrible disappointment to the inventor, for he had made all his plans to return to Europe in the spring of 1839 to carry out the Russian contract, which he was led to believe was perfectly certain, and the Czar’s signature simply a matter of form.  While at the time, and probably for all his life, Morse considered his failure in Europe as a cruel stroke of Fate, we cannot but conclude, in the light of future developments, that here again Fate was cruel in order to be kind.  The invention, while it had been pronounced a scientific success, and had been awarded the palm over all other systems by the foremost scientists of the world, had yet to undergo the baptism of fire on the field of battle.  It had never been tried over long distances in the open air, and many practical modifications had yet to be made, the necessity for which could only be ascertained during the actual construction of a commercial line.  Morse’s first idea, adhered to by him until found by experience, in the building of