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of the sympathetic needles.)
    Two new inventions quickly followed: the galvanometer, which indicates the flow of current by the deflection of a rotating
     needle, and the electromagnet, a coil of wire that behaves just like a permanent magnet—but only as long as current is flowing
     through it. Together with the new voltaic battery, either could be used as the basis of an electric telegraph.
    But those who tried to build telegraphs based on electromagnetic principles soon ran into a new problem. Even when equipped
     with the latest batteries and electromagnets, some people seemed to have less success than others when they tried signaling
     over long wires; and nobody could understand why.
    In 1824, for example, the British mathematician and physicist Peter Barlow considered the possibility of building an electric
     telegraph that would send messages using an electromagnet that made a clicking sound as it was switched on and off. "There
     is only one question which would render the result doubtful: is there any diminution of the effect [of electricity] by lengthening
     the conducting wire?" he asked. "I found such a diminution with only two hundred feet of wire, as at once to convince me of
     the impracticability of the scheme."
    Barlow was not alone. In their own experiments, many other scientists had found that the longer the wire they used, the weaker
     the effects of the electricity at the other end. To those working in the field, a practical electric telegraph seemed as far
     away as ever.
    S AMUEL F. B. morse was born in Charles-town, Massachusetts, in 1791, the year of Chappe's first demonstration of an optical
     telegraph. He was a johnny-come-lately to the field of electric telegraphy. Had he started building an electric telegraph
     a little earlier, he might have got home in time for his wife's funeral.
    Morse's wife, Lucretia, died suddenly at their home in New Haven, Connecticut, on the afternoon of February 7, 1825, while
     her husband was away. He was starting to make progress in his chosen career as a painter and had gone to Washington to try
     to break into the lucrative society portrait business. He had just been commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of the
     marquis de Lafayette, a military hero, and his career finally seemed to be taking off. "I long to hear from you," he wrote
     in a letter to his wife on February 10, unaware that she was already dead.
    Washington was four days' travel from New Haven, so Morse received the letter from his father telling him of Lucretia's death
     on February 11, the day before her funeral. Traveling as fast as he could, he arrived home the following week. His wife was
     already buried. In the United States in 1825, messages could still only be conveyed as fast as a messenger could carry them.

    Samuel F. B. Morse, one of the inventors of the electric telegraph.
    Morse was forty-one when he caught the telegraph bug following a chance meeting on board a ship in the mid-Atlantic. In i832,
     he was returning to the United States from Europe, where he had spent three years in Italy, Switzerland, and France improving
     his painting skills and working on a rather harebrained scheme to bring the treasures of the Louvre in Paris to an American
     audience. On a six-by-nine-foot canvas, he was painting miniature copies of thirty-eight of the Louvre's finest paintings,
     which he collectively dubbed the Gallery of the Louvre. The painting, still unfinished, accompanied Morse onto the sailing packet Sully, a fast ship that was carrying mail, together with a small number of well-to-do passengers, across the Atlantic.
    His intention was to finish the Gallery of the Louvre when he got back to the United States, and then exhibit it and charge admission. It was a scheme typical of Morse: Since i823,
     for example, he had been experimenting with a marble-cutting device that would supposedly make copies of any sculpture, with
     a view to reproducing well-known works of art in large