"I suppose, of course, that you had already made these experiments before the company arrived whom you had invited. But I claim to have witnessed _the first transmission and recording of words_ by lightning ever made public.... The arrangement which you exhibited on the above mentioned occasion, as well as the mode of receiving the dispatches, were substantially the same as those you now employ. I feel certain that you had then already grasped the whole invention, however you may have since perfected the details." Others bore testimony in similar words, so that we may regard it as proved that, both in 1835 and 1836, demonstrations were made which, uncouth though they were, compared to present-day perfection, proved that the electric telegraph was about to emerge from the realms of fruitless experiment. Among these witnesses were Daniel Huntington, Hon. Hamilton Fish, and Commodore Shubrick; and several of these gentlemen asserted that, at that early period, Morse confidently predicted that Europe and America would eventually be united by an electric wire. The letters written by Morse during these critical years have become hopelessly dispersed, and but few have come into my possession. His brothers were both in New York, so that there was no necessity of writing to them, and the letters written to others cannot, at this late day, be traced. As he also, unfortunately, did not keep a journal, I must depend on the testimony of others, and on his own recollections in later years for a chronicle of his struggles. The pencil copy of a letter written to a friend in Albany, on August 27, 1837, has, however, survived, and the following sentences will, I think, be found interesting:-- "Thanks to you, my dear C----, for the concern you express in regard to my health. It has been perfectly good and is now, with the exception of a little anxiety in relation to the telegraph and to my great pictorial undertaking, which wears the furrows of my face a little deeper. My Telegraph, in all its essential points, is tested to my own satisfaction and that of the scientific gentlemen who have seen it; but the machinery (all which, from its peculiar character, I have been compelled to make myself) is imperfect, and before it can be perfected I have reason to fear that other nations will take the hint and rob me both of the credit and the profit. There are indications of this in the foreign journals lately received. I have a defender in the 'Journal of Commerce' (which I send you that you may know what is the progress of the matter), and doubtless other journals of our country will not allow foreign nations to take the credit of an invention of such vast importance as they assign to it, when they learn that it certainly belongs to America.