A Brill Calendar: May 24

American Inventiveness?

Few yarns in Uncle Sam’s barn-yard are told as persistently as the match of inventiveness with endurance.

Defoe’s Robinson is a proto-American, thinly disguised as a Briton. The hero-brand marketed by Wayne, Cooper, & Eastwood, et al, doesn’t carry text-books in the saddle-bag. If typographical products would be there at all, a King James version of the Bible in 8-vo will do. American archetypes of this resilience, embodied by Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931) and Henry Ford (1863 – 1947), frown on study if it isn’t hands-on experimenting.

Still, this genius to invent (supposedly innate in the nation between Sea and Shining Sea), remains intertwined with scholarly ‘Old Europe’; and was illustrated on May 24 1844, when Samuel Morse, an early practitioner of the do-it- yourself dictum, transferred a pious message - ‘What Hath God Wrought!’ – from the Capitol of Washington, District of Columbia, to Baltimore, Maryland, thus baptizing long-distance telecommunication by means of an electrical telegraph. It is seldom in the technological history that a public demonstration was praised so profusely.

With such laudations in mind, Morse, (Charlestown, Mass. April 27 1791 – New York City, New York, April 2 1872) easily joins the ranks of self-taught, single-trick wizards; a Moses leading his people to the Promised Land of information & communication, an Edison ‘avant la lettre’. A little investigation deconstructs such a reading. Morse graduated from Yale in 1810, and was regarded as a superb portrait-painter; with a direct and first-hand awareness of Europe ‘in situ’ and developments in his art, and combined this with a grasp on technical novelties as they originated there; like electromagnets and the daguerreotype, patented in 1837.

What Samuel Morse wrought is a result of transatlantic civilization, not an epiphany of an all-American phenomenon.