"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 was deemed necessary by Morse to complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper.
The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it were "What hath God wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with superstitious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people, infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in repair along the Pacific Railway.
To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an inventor, and loving art to the end.