“A circumstance which tends to confuse, in fairly ascertaining priority of invention, is that a subsequent state of knowledge is confounded in the general mind with the state of knowledge when the invention is first announced as successful.  This is certainly very unfair.  When Morse announced his invention, what was the general state of knowledge in regard to the telegraph?  It should be borne in mind that a knowledge of the futile attempts at electric telegraphs previous to his successful one has been brought out from the lumber garret of science by the research of eighteen years.  Nothing was known of such telegraphs to many scientific men of the highest attainments in the centres of civilization.  Professor Morse says himself (and certainly he has not given in any single instance a statement which has been falsified) that, at the time he devised his system, he supposed himself to be the first person that ever put the words ‘electric telegraph’ together.  He supposed himself at the time the originator of the phrase as well as the thing.  But, aside from his positive assertion, the truth of this statement is not only possible but very probable.  The comparatively few (very few as compared with the mass who now are learned in the facts) who were in the habit of reading the scientific journals may have read of the thought of an electric telegraph about the year 1832, and even of Ronald’s, and Betancourt’s, and Salva’s, and Lomond’s impracticable schemes previously, and have forgotten them again, with thousands of other dreams, as the ingenious ideas of visionary men; ideas so visionary as to be considered palpably impracticable, declared to be so, indeed, by Barlow, a scientific man of high standing and character; yet the mass of the scientific as well as the general public were ignorant even of the attempts that had been made.  The fact of any of them having been published in some magazine at the time, whose circulation may be two or three thousand, and which was soon virtually lost amid the shelves of immense libraries, does not militate against the assertion that the world was ignorant of the fact.  We can show conclusively the existence of this ignorance respecting telegraphs at the time of the invention of Morse’s telegraph.”

The rest of this note (evidently written for publication) is missing, but enough remains to prove the point.

Thus we have seen that the idea of his telegraph came to Morse as a sudden inspiration and that he was quite ignorant of the fact that others had thought of using electricity to convey intelligence to a distance.  Mr. Prime in his biography says:  “Of all the great inventions that have made their authors immortal and conferred enduring benefit upon mankind, no one was so completely grasped at its inception as this.”

One of his fellow passengers, J. Francis Fisher, Esq., counsellor-at-law of Philadelphia, gave the following testimony at Morse’s request:—­