On April 1, 1845, the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore was opened for general use. Congress had appropriated $8,000 to maintain it for the first year, and placed it under the direction of the Postmaster-General. The official charge was one cent for every four characters transmitted. The receipts of the first four days were one cent, for the fifth day twelve and a half cents, for the seventh sixty cents, for the eighth one dollar and thirty-two cents, for the ninth one dollar and four cents. Morse offered to sell his invention to the government for $100,000, but the Postmaster-General declined the offer, stating in his report that the service “had not satisfied him that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures.” With the public opening of the line between Washington and Baltimore the practical success of the new electric telegraph was assured. The Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed to carry a wire from New York to Philadelphia, and thence another line was run to Baltimore in 1846. The telegraph being an accomplished fact, pirates of the patent now appeared, and for a course of years Morse and his partners had to fight for their rights. Henry O’Reilly, who had been employed in building the first lines, contracted to construct another from Philadelphia to St. Louis, and when that was finished he formed a company known as the People’s Line, to run to New Orleans. He claimed to use instruments entirely different from those patented by Morse, and so to be free from the payment of royalties. Morse applied for an injunction, and on appeal the Federal Supreme Court decided in his favor. Other similar suits followed, and in each one the decision justified Morse’s contention. The conclusion was that even though other men had known of the possibilities by experiment, it was the fact that he had first put the matter into practical form directed toward a specific purpose, and hence was to be regarded in law as the inventor. The telegraph grew with the country. The Western Union Company followed the stage-coach across the plains to California, and soon the frontier towns were linked to the large cities of the East. Other men took up the work in other lines, and in 1854 Cyrus W. Field formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay a cable between America and Europe. As Morse had said when he first began seriously to study the subject on board the _Sully_, “If it will go ten miles without stopping I can make it go around the globe.”