On the packet ship _Sully_, sailing from the French port of Havre for New York on October 1, 1832, were Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, who had been attending certain lectures on electricity in Paris, and an American artist named Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Dr. Jackson was intensely interested in electricity, and more especially in some experiments that Faraday had lately been making in regard to it. He had an electromagnet in his trunk, and one day, as a number of the passengers sat at dinner, he began to describe the laws of electro-magnetism as they were then known. He told how the force of a magnet could be tremendously increased by passing an electric current a number of times about a bar of soft iron. One of the diners asked how far electricity could be transmitted and how fast it traveled. Dr. Jackson answered that it seemed to travel instantaneously, none of the experimenters having detected any appreciable difference in time between the completing of the electric circuit and the appearance of the spark at any distance. Morse, who had been interested in the study of electricity at Yale College, said that if the electric current could be made visible in any part of the circuit he saw no reason why messages could not be sent instantaneously by electricity. To send a message would simply require the breaking of the circuit in such different ways as could be made to represent the letters of the alphabet. The conversation went on to other subjects, but the artist kept the conclusion he had just stated in mind. That night he walked the deck discussing the matter with Dr. Jackson, and for the rest of the voyage he was busy jotting down suggestions in his note-book and elaborating a plan for transforming breaks in an electric current into letters. The facts at his disposal, and his first method of dealing with them, were comparatively simple. The electric current would travel to any distance along a wire. The current being broken, a spark would appear. The spark would stand for one letter. The lack of a spark might stand for another. The length of its absence would indicate another. With these three indications as a starting-point he could build up an alphabet. As there was no limit to the distance that electricity would travel there seemed no reason why these dots and dashes, or sparks and spaces, should not be sent all around the world.