To the American reader the name of Karl Friedrich Gauss may have an unfamiliar sound.  Gauss was already a youth of fourteen when Morse was born, though the latter outlived the German mathematician by seventeen years.  Gauss was a professor of Mathematics at Goettingen, where he passed nearly the whole of his life.  In the early part of the century he distinguished himself in astronomy and in other branches of physical science.  He then became interested in magnetic and electrical phenomena, and in 1833, with the assistance of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, one of his fellow-professors, who died in 1891, he erected at Goettingen a magnetic observatory.  There he began to experiment with the subtle agent which was soon to be placed at the service of mankind.

The observatory was constructed without the use of iron, in order that the magnetic phenomena might be studied under favorable conditions.  Humboldt and Arago had previously constructed laboratories without using iron—­for iron is the great disturber—­and from them Gauss obtained his hint.  Weber was also expert in the management of magneto-electrical currents.  Gauss, with the aid of his co-worker, constructed a line of telegraph, and sent signals by the agency of the magnetic current to a neighboring town.  This was nearly ten years before Morse had fully succeeded in like experimentation.

It appears that the German scientists regarded their telegraph as simply the tangible expression or apparatus to illustrate scientific facts and principles.  It was for this reason, we presume, that no further headway was made at Goettingen in the development of telegraphy.  It was also for the additional reason that men rarely or never accept what is really the first demonstration and exemplification of a new departure in scientific knowledge.  Such is the timidity of the human mind—­such its conservative attachment to the known thing and to the old method as against the new—­that it prefers to stay in the tumble-down ruin of bygone opinions and practices, rather than go up and inhabit the splendid but unfamiliar temple of the future.

Gauss and Weber were left with their scientific discovery; and, indeed, Morse in the New World of practicality and quick adaptations, was about to be rejected and cast out.  The sorrows through which he passed need not here be recounted.  They are sufficiently sad and sufficiently humiliating.  His unavailing appeals to the American Congress are happily hidden in the rubbish of history, and are somewhat dimmed by the intervention of more than half a century.  But his humiliation was extreme.  Smart Congressmen, partisans, the ignorant flotsam of conventions and intrigues, heard the philosopher with contempt.  A few heard him with sympathy; and the opinion in his favor grew, as if by the pressure of shame, until he was finally supported, and in a midnight hour of an expiring session of Congress, or rather in the early morning of the fourth of March, 1843, the munificent appropriation of $30,000 was placed at his disposal for the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore.