h British Columbia,
Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Siberia. Siberia had been connected
with European Russia, and thus practically the entire line could be
stretched on land, only short submarine cables being necessary. It was
then seriously doubted that cables long enough to cross the Atlantic
were practicable. The expedition started in 1865, a fleet of thirty
vessels carrying the men and supplies. Tremendous difficulties had
been overcome and a considerable part of the work accomplished when
the successful completion of the Atlantic cable made the work useless.
Nearly three million dollars had been expended by the Western Union
in this attempt. Yet, despite this loss, its affairs were so generally
successful and the need for the telegraph so real that it continued to
thrive until it reached its present remarkable development.

While the line-builders were busy stretching telegraph wires into
almost every city and town in the nation, others were perfecting the
apparatus. Alfred Vail was a leading figure in this work. Already he
had played a large part in designing and constructing the apparatus to
carry out Morse's ideas, and he continued to improve and perfect
until practically nothing remained of Morse's original apparatus. The
original Morse transmitter had consisted of a porte-rule and movable
type. This was cumbersome, and Vail substituted a simple key to make
and break the circuit. Vail had also constructed the apparatus to
emboss the message upon the moving strip of paper, but this he now
improved upon. The receiving apparatus was simplified and the pen was
replaced by a disk smeared with ink which marked the dots and dashes
upon the paper.

As we have noticed, Morse took particular pride in the fact that
the receiving apparatus in his telegraph was self-recording, and
considered this as one of the most important parts of his system. But
when the telegraph began to come into commercial use the operators at
the receiving end noticed that they could read the messages from the
long and short periods between the clicks of the receiving mechanism.
Thus they were taking the message by ear and the recording mechanism
was superfluous. Rules and fines failed to break them of the habit,
and Vail, recognizing the utility of the development, constructed a
receiver which had no recording device, but from which the messages
were read by listening to the clicks as the armature struck against
the frame in which it was set.