By Morristown Green Contributor -

By Peggy Carroll

It was a far from perfect machine. It was a bit crude, a little unfinished.

But it worked. And on Jan. 6, 1838, it made history.

On that day, at the Morristown home of Judge Stephen Vail and his family,

it sent a message through two miles of wiring spread throughout the room in what is now called Historic Speedwell.

The message: “A patient waiter is no loser.”

The men responsible: Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of what he called the telegraph (“Tele” for “far” and “graph” for “writing”) and Alfred Vail, a son of the house and a gifted machinist who had refined Morse’s first awkward creation to make it suitable to show and sell.

It worked then and less than a week later, the telegraph got wider attention.

On Jan. 11, several hundred men and women crowded into Speedwell for the first public demonstration of the machine. They gathered in what is now called the Factory Building, a site now dubbed the “Birthplace of the Telegraph.”

This time the short message was very practical: “Railroad cars just arrived. 345 passengers.”

The audience was most impressed.

The local newspaper, The Journeyman, reported that with the telegraph “time and distance are annihilated and the most distant points of the country are by this means brought into the nearest neighborhood.”

A message that could take days to travel from New York to Washington now arrived in minutes.

It was a tool used by everyone from newspaper reporters (who were to send Civil War dispatches by telegraph) to railway managers.

Alfred Vail was central to its success. He had first seen the machine while visiting New York University, his alma mater, and had by chance witnessed one of Morse’s early telegraph experiments.

Fascinated, Vail, who had worked as a machinist at the Speedwell Iron Works owned by his father, offered to help. He negotiated an agreement with Morse, a failed artist and NYU professor.

He offered to work on the telegraph technology and to pay all the expenses. He then persuaded his father to give the project financial backing and he took up the task of making a working model at Speedwell.

In the few months after the Morristown demonstration, Morse and Vail took the telegraph to New York, to Philadelphia and to President Martin Van Buren – and they obtained from Congress a $30,000 grant to build the first line in 1844 from Washington to Baltimore.

Morse became world famous; Vail, not so much. Though the terms of the agreement with Morse stipulated that Alfred and his brother and partner George would receive 25 percent of proceeds, he actually received little – even though he continued to develop new technology. He was responsible for the sending key and the improved recording registers and relay magnets.

There also are those who believe that he had more to do with the Morse Code than the man it is named for.

He and Morse were the first two telegraph operators on that first line and Vail helped build and manage several other lines between 1845 and 1848, when he left the business. He was paid at the time only $900 a year.

Nor did Morse acknowledge his contributions or those of his family– even though the Vails were picking up the bills.

Few people, in fact, know much if anything about Alfred Vail.

Historic Speedwell, operated by the Morris County Park Commission, exists to correct that. In tours and hands-on exhibits, it tells the story of the Vails and the part that the Factory Building, now a National Historic Landmark, played in the invention of the telegraph.

Further information is available on the Historic Speedwell website.

Season: April through October

April-June: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am-5 pm, closed on Sunday and Monday

July-October: Wednesday through Saturday, 10 am-6 pm, Sunday noon-6pm, closed on Monday and Tuesday. Historic Speedwell is open some Sundays April-June. Check its calendar of events. Guided tours are available of the Vail Home, Factory Building and Wheelhouse.