Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/644

636 whole neighborhood, for five miles round, will know that Comet must stop, if only they understand spoken language,—and, among others, the engineman of Comet will understand it; and Comet will not run into that wreck of worlds which gives the order,—with his nucleus of hot iron and his tail of five hundred tons of coal.—So, of the signals which fog-bells can give, attached to light-houses. How excellent to have them proclaim through the darkness, "I am Wall"! Or of signals for steamship-engineers. When our friends were on board the "Arabia" the other day, and she and the "Europa" pitched into each other,—as if, on that happy week, all the continents were to kiss and join hands all round,—how great the relief to the passengers on each, if, through every night of their passage, collision had been prevented by this simple expedient! One boat would have screamed, "Europa, Europa, Europa," from night to morning,—and the other, "Arabia, Arabia, Arabia,"—and neither would have been mistaken, as one unfortunately was, for a light-house.

The long and short of it is, that whoever can mark distinctions of time can use this alphabet of long-and-short, however he may mark them. It is, therefore, within the compass of all intelligent beings, except those who are no longer conscious of the passage of time, having exchanged its limitations for the wider sweep of eternity. The illimitable range of this alphabet, however, is not half disclosed when this has been said. Most articulate language addresses itself to one sense, or at most to two, sight and sound. I see, as I write, that the particular illustrations I have given are all of them confined to signals seen or signals heard. But the dot-and-line alphabet, in the few years of its history, has already shown that it is not restricted to these two senses, but makes itself intelligible to all. Its message, of course, is heard as well as read. Any good operator understands the sounds of its ticks upon the flowing strip of paper, as well as when he sees it. As he lies in his cot at midnight, he will expound the passing message without striking a light to see it. But this is only what may be said of any written language. You can read this article to your wife, or she can read it, as she prefers; that is, she chooses whether it shall address her eye or her ear. But the long-and-short alphabet of Morse and his imitators despises such narrow range. It addresses whichever of the five senses the listener chooses. This fact is illustrated by a curious set of anecdotes—never yet put in print, I think—of that critical dispatch which in one night announced General Taylor's death to this whole land. Most of the readers of these lines probably read that dispatch in the morning's paper. The compositors and editors had read it. To them it was a dispatch to the eye. But half the operators at the stations heard it ticked out, by the register stroke, and knew it before they wrote it down for the press. To them it was a dispatch to the ear. My good friend Langenzunge had not that resource. He had just been promised, by the General himself, (under whom he served at Palo Alto,) the office of Superintendent of the Rocky-Mountain Lines. He was returning from Washington over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on a freight-train, when he heard of the President's danger. Langenzunge loved Old Rough and Ready,—and he felt badly about his own office, too. But his extempore train chose to stop at a forsaken shanty-village on the Potomac, for four mortal hours, at midnight. What does he do, but walk down the line into the darkness, climb a telegraph-post, cut a wire, and apply the two ends to his tongue, to taste, at the fatal moment, the words, "Died at half past ten." Poor Langenzunge! he hardly had nerve to solder the wire again. Cogs told me that they had just fitted up the Naguadavick stations with Bain's chemical revolving disc. This disc is charged with a salt of potash, which, when the electric spark passes through it, is changed to Prussian blue. Your dispatch is noiselessly written in dark blue dots and lines.