Lot 161: MORSE, Samuel F. B. (1791 - 1872) Autograph letter signed (“Saml: F: B: Mor

MORSE, Samuel F. B. (1791 - 1872) Autograph letter signed (“Saml: F: B: Morse”) to Joseph Tracy, Washington, 24 March 1846. One page, 250 x 202mm, bifolium with integral transmittal leaf addressed in his hand (partial separations at fold intersections). Samuel Morse ofers sage advice to a Boston inventor of an alternative method of telegraphy: “None as yet can compete with the lightening.” A frank and blunt letter from Morse, writing less than two years after he had established the frst long-distance telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Morse tersely acknowledges receipt of Tracy’s letter, “in which you say you have also invented a Telegraph, and that you intend doing nothing in relating to it ‘until I have had time to speak.’ You do not give me any clue to your plan, so that I am unable to speak. But as I am a Yankee I have the privilege of guessing, and also of guessing twice, if I guess wrong the frst time. I guess then your plan is a tube flled with water, which has often been the subject of our thoughts and plannings, and which has long been discarded no because it not feasible for a certain distance but from its expense...” Assuring his correspondent that he has received many “communications on various plans from all parts of the country,” but “None as yet can compete with the lightening.” The recipient was likely the Reverend Joseph Tracy (1793-1874) who had claimed to have had developed method of using short and long pulses as a code for telegraphy, independently of Morse – and several years after the formulation of Morse’s own code (See Edward L. Morse, “The Dot and Dash Alphabet”, The Century Magazine, vol. 83, March 1912, pp. 700-701).