, just after he had successfully
fulfilled a liberal commission to paint General Lafayette, was the great
blow of his young manhood.

The National Academy of Design Morse helped to found in New York in
1826, and of this institution he was first president. About the same
time we find him renewing his early interest in electrical experiments.
A few years later he is sailing for Europe, there to execute many
copying commissions. And on his return from this stay abroad the idea of
the telegraph suggested itself to him.

Of the exact way in which Morse first conceived the idea of making
electricity the means of conveying intelligence, various accounts have
been given, the one usually accepted being that while on board the
packet-ship _Sully_, a fellow passenger related some experiments he had
witnessed in Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital which made such an
impression upon one of his auditors that he walked the deck the whole
night. Professor Morse's own statement was that he gained his knowledge
of the working of the electro-magnet while attending the lectures of
Doctor J. Freeman Dana, then professor of chemistry in the University of
New York, lectures which were delivered before the New York Atheneum.

"I witnessed," says Morse, "the effects of the conjunctive wires in the
different forms described by him in his lectures, and exhibited to his
audience. The electro-magnet was put in action by an intense battery; it
was made to sustain the weight of its armature, when the conjunctive
wire was connected with the poles of the battery, or the circuit was
closed; and it was made to 'drop its load' upon opening the circuit."

Yet after the inventor had made his discovery he had the greatest
difficulty in getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. Heartsick with
despondency, and with his means utterly exhausted, he finally applied
to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to put his invention to the test
of practical illustration, and his petition was carried through with a
majority of only two votes! These two votes to the good were enough,
however, to save the wonderful discovery, perhaps from present
obscurity, and with the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress
Morse stretched his first wires from Washington to Baltimore--wires, it
will be noted, because the principle of the ground circuit was not then
known, and only later discovered by accident. So that a wire to go and
another to return between the cities