'O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes'.
Through many an Ohm the Weber flew,
And clicked the answer back to me,
'I am thy Farad, staunch and true,
Charged to a Volt with love for thee'.

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible—indeed, inevitable—the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.
From a letter to his brother describing the challenge of defending his patents (19 Apr 1848).

I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged ... and I was assured by other senators after he left the room that they had no confidence in it.
Reminiscence by Oliver Hampton Smith, Senator for Indiana, upon meeting Morse at the demonstration of his telegraph to the U.S. Congress in 1842.

It baptised the American telegraph with the name of its Author.
Comment on the choice of a biblical text as the inaugural message.

It is safe to say that the little pamphlet which was left to find its way through the slow mails to the English scientist outweighed in importance and interest for the human race all the press dispatches which have been flashed under the channel since the delivery of the address—March 24. The rapid growth of the Continental capitals, the movements of princely noodles and fat, vulgar Duchesses, the debates in the Servian Skupschina, and the progress or receding of sundry royal gouts are given to the wings of lightening; a lumbering mail-coach is swift enough for the news of one of the great scientific discoveries of the age. Similarly, the gifted gentlemen who daily sift out for the American public the pith and kernel of the Old World's news; leave Dr. KOCH and his bacilli to chance it in the ocean mails, while they challenge the admiration of every gambler and jockey in this Republic by the fullness and accuracy of their cable reports of horse-races.

The privilege is not allowed even to genius in this world to inspect its own elements, and read its own destiny, and it is perhaps well for mankid that it is so. Could we lift the curtain which hides our future lives, and glance hastily at the misfortunes, the vexations, and the disappointments which await us, we should be discouraged from attempting the performance of even of such deeds as are destined eventually to crown us with honor.
In a book of his reminiscenses, Oliver Hampton Smith, years after his first meeting with Morse, described the inventor - who had by then overcome the initial scepticism over his invention, but instead needed to vigorously defend his exclusive right of property in the magnetic telegraph.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

We must raise the salaries of our operators or they will all be taken from us, that is, all that are good for anything. You will recollect that, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, I took the ground that 'it was our policy to make the office of operator desirable, to pay operators well and make their situation so agreeable that intelligent men and men of character will seek the place and dread to lose it.' I still think so, and, depend upon it, it is the soundest economy to act on this principle.

What God Hath Wrought. Message transmitted to inaugurate the first U.S. telegraph line (24 May 1844). The biblical text, from Numbers, 23:23, was selected by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Commissioner of Patents.

[It would not be long] ere the whole surface of this country would be channelled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land, making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.

[The compass needle] as the guide of Vasco de Gama to the East Indies, and of Columbus to the West Indies and the New World, it was pre-eminently the precursor and pioneer of the telegraph. Silently, and as with finger on its lips, it led them across the waste of waters to the new homes of the world; but when these were largely filled, and houses divided between the old and new hemispheres longed to exchange affectionate greetings, it removed its finger and broke silence. The quivering magnetic needle which lies in the coil of the galvanometer is the tongue of the electric telegraph, and already engineers talk of it as speaking.

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.