His small capital was dwindling. His efforts to paint historical pictures rather than portraits, and his share in paying off certain debts of his father’s, had made great inroads on the money he had saved. To add to his misfortunes his wife died in February, 1825. In 1829 he went abroad, visited the great galleries of Europe, and tried to find a more ready market for his historical studies. It was on his return from France in 1832 that the conversation of Dr. Jackson and the other passengers turned his thoughts in the direction of an electric telegraph. Now came his gradual transformation from painter to inventor. His brothers gave him a room with them in New York, and this became his studio and laboratory at one and the same time. Easels and plastercasts were mixed with type-moulds and galvanic batteries, and Morse turned from a portrait to his working model of telegraph transmitter and back again a dozen times a day. He painted to make his living, but his interest was steadily turning to his invention. He had many friends, and a wide reputation as a man of great intellectual ability, and in a few years he was appointed the first Professor of the Literature of the Arts of Design in the new University of the City of New York. This gave him a home in the university building on Washington Square, and there he moved his apparatus. At this time he was chiefly concerned with the question of how far a message could be sent by the electric current, for it was known that the current grew feebler in proportion to the resistance of the wire through which it travels. He had learned that the electro-magnet at the receiving end would at any great distance become so enfeebled that it would fail to make any record of the message. His solution of this difficulty was a relay system. He explained this to Professor Gale, a colleague at the university, who later testified as to Morse’s work. “Suppose,” said the inventor, “that in experimenting on twenty miles of wire we should find that the power of magnetism is so feeble that it will not move a lever with certainty a hair’s breadth: that would be insufficient, it may be, to write or print; yet it would be sufficient to close and break another or a second circuit twenty miles farther, and this second circuit could be made, in the same manner, to break and close a third circuit twenty miles farther, and so on around the globe.” Gale proved of great assistance. So far Morse had only used his recorder over a few yards of wire, his electro-magnet had been of the simplest make, and his battery was a single pair of plates. Gale suggested that his simple electro-magnet, with its few turns of thick wire, should be replaced by one with a coil of long thin wire. In this way a much feebler current would be able to excite the magnet, and the recorder would mark at a much greater distance. He also urged the use of a much more powerful battery. The two men now erected a working telegraph in the rooms of