‘Vail’ Code?

In 1887, 18 years after his father’s death, Stephen Vail took up metaphorical arms to claim Alfred Vail’s place as a key figure in communications history. Starting a war of words that would last decades and end with a declaration carved into stone, the younger Vail bombarded newspaper editors with letters. Alfred Vail’s son insisted that his dad had invented the dot-and-dash system used in telegraphy and known to all, and most gallingly to the younger man, as “Morse” code.

Before telegraphy, the United States had been more a collection of outposts than a nation—when a treaty ended the War of 1812, word from peace talks in Europe between Britain and the United States took so long to creep across the Atlantic that two weeks after the signatures on the peace treaty had dried British and American troops were fighting the Battle of New Orleans. Until telegraphy arrived for good in 1844, information traveled no faster than horses could gallop, trains could roll, or ships could sail. News from Boston reached San Francisco and vice versa by traveling aboard vessels that had to round South America’s southern tip. Only dreamers spoke of rails crossing North America or a canal traversing the Isthmus of Panama.

Then a couple of fellows named Alfred Vail and Samuel F.B. Morse got into the act.

Since the 18th century, scientific savants had been talking about electricity’s potential to revolutionize communications. The theoretical means had a name—“telegraph”—compounded of the Greek for “to write” and “at a distance”—but no practicable form. In October 1832, one of those visionaries, Samuel F.B. Morse, was sailing to New York from France. Six feet tall, Morse, 41, was a successful artist—he taught art at newly opened New York University—and a stubborn extrovert with an interest in invention. At dinner one evening, shipboard table talk turned to the topic of electromagnetic communication. Inspired, Morse pictured wires somehow carrying messages. His concept was vague, but, as he wrote later, he saw no reason “why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.” Once back in Manhattan, Morse began to tinker with his notion. Impelled by loathing for immigrants, he briefly distracted himself with a failed 1836 run for mayor of New York on a nativist ticket.

But Morse never gave up on telegraphy, envisioning a system he called the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. As a test