ately to examine into the
difficulties which have troubled you, but about which we apprehend no
serious issue....

"If you can possibly get the circular portrule completed before we go it
will be a great convenience, not to say an indispensable matter, for I
have just learned so much of Wheatstone's Telegraph as to be pretty well
persuaded that my superiority over him will be made evident more by the
rapidity with which I can make the portrule work than in almost any other
particular."

At last every detail had been attended to, and in a postscript to a
letter of April 28 he says: "We sail on the 16th of May for Liverpool in
the ship Europe, so I think you will have time to complete circular
portrule. Try, won't you?"

CHAPTER XXV

JUNE, 1838--JANUARY 21, 1839

Arrival in England.--Application for letters patent.--Cooke and
Wheatstone's telegraph.--Patent refused.--Departure for Paris.--Patent
secured in France.--Earl of Elgin.--Earl of Lincoln.--Baron de
Meyendorff.--Russian contract.--Return to London.--Exhibition at the Earl
of Lincoln's.--Letter from secretary of Lord Campbell, Attorney-General.
--Coronation of Queen Victoria.--Letters to daughter.--Birth of the Count
of Paris.--Exhibition before the Institute of France.--Arago; Baron
Humboldt.--Negotiations with the Government and Saint-Germain Railway.--
Reminiscences of Dr. Kirk.--Letter of the Honorable H.L. Ellsworth.--
Letter to F.O.J. Smith.--Dilatoriness of the French.

It seems almost incredible to us, who have come to look upon marvel after
marvel of science and invention as a matter of course, that it should
have taken so many years to convince the world that the telegraph was a
possibility and not an iridescent dream. While men of science and a few
far-sighted laymen saw that the time was ripe for this much-needed
advance in the means of conveying intelligence, governments and
capitalists had held shyly aloof, and, even now, weighed carefully the
advantages of different systems before deciding which, if any, was the
best. For there were at this time several different systems in the field,
and Morse soon found that he would have to compete with the trained
scientists of the Old World, backed, at last, by their respective
governments, in his effort to prove that his invention was the simplest
and the best of them all. That he should have persisted in spite of
discouragement after discouragement, struggling to overcome obstacles
which to the f