Arrival in England.--Application for letters patent.--Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph.--Patent refused.--Departure for Paris.--Patent secured in France.--Earl of Elgin.--Earl of Lincoln.--Baron de Meyendorff.--Russian contract.--Return to London.--Exhibition at the Earl of Lincoln's.--Letter from secretary of Lord Campbell, Attorney-General. --Coronation of Queen Victoria.--Letters to daughter.--Birth of the Count of Paris.--Exhibition before the Institute of France.--Arago; Baron Humboldt.--Negotiations with the Government and Saint-Germain Railway.-- Reminiscences of Dr. Kirk.--Letter of the Honorable H.L. Ellsworth.-- Letter to F.O.J. Smith.--Dilatoriness of the French. It seems almost incredible to us, who have come to look upon marvel after marvel of science and invention as a matter of course, that it should have taken so many years to convince the world that the telegraph was a possibility and not an iridescent dream. While men of science and a few far-sighted laymen saw that the time was ripe for this much-needed advance in the means of conveying intelligence, governments and capitalists had held shyly aloof, and, even now, weighed carefully the advantages of different systems before deciding which, if any, was the best. For there were at this time several different systems in the field, and Morse soon found that he would have to compete with the trained scientists of the Old World, backed, at last, by their respective governments, in his effort to prove that his invention was the simplest and the best of them all. That he should have persisted in spite of discouragement after discouragement, struggling to overcome obstacles which to the faint-hearted would have seemed insuperable, constitutes one of his greatest claims to undying fame. He left on record an account of his experiences in Europe on this voyage, memorable in more ways than one, and extracts from this, and from letters written to his daughter and brothers, will best tell the story:-- "On May 16, 1838, I left the United States and arrived in London in June, for the purpose of obtaining letters patent for my Electro-Magnetic Telegraph System. I learned before I left the United States that Professor Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke, of London, had obtained letters patent in England for a '_Magnetic-Needle Telegraph_,' based, as the name implies, on the _deflection of the magnetic needle_. Their telegraph, at that time, required _six conductors_ between the two points of intercommunication _for a single instrument_ at each of the two termini. Their mode of indicating signs for communicating intelligence was by deflecting _five magnetic needles_ in various directions, in such a way as to point to the required letters upon a diamond-shaped dial-plate. It was necessary that the signal should be _observed at the instant_, or it was lost and vanished forever.