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63 some Americans his wish to make an application for a patent at the Patent Office in Washington.

Morse's idea, then, was not to produce on paper letters or signs representing them, but to have only ten signs for the nine digits and the zero. With these he proposed to express numbers on strips of paper. In an alphabetical vocabulary the words were all numbered. He had an eleventh sign which served to indicate that the next following signs were really to represent numbers, not words. For each of the signs mentioned, he had a metal type with a certain number of A shaped projections. These types he introduced, one after the other, into a port-rule by which they were moved forward. The teeth of the types were to lift a lever, by means of which the electric current was allowed to flow through the coils of an electro-magnet, causing it to attract an armature fixed to a moveable vertical lever having at its lower end a pencil, which marked on a strip of paper, passing slowly over a roller, zig-zags somewhat like the teeth of a saw.

To find out afterwards what the groups of zig-zags meant, one had to convert the digits they represented into numbers, and then look into the vocabulary for that number to learn what word was meant by it.