Lew Wallace had several patents to his name and was intrigued by the scientific advances of the 19th century. He was not, however, the only member of his family to be intrigued by and embrace new technology. All those who Facebook, email, text and tweet should take a moment to remember the contributions of Lew’s father, David.
David Wallace played a prominent role in Hoosier politics from the 1820s through the 1850s. In 1840, he was elected as a Whig to represent Indiana in Congress, serving from 1841 to 1843. He was not re-elected in 1843 and Lew Wallace, in his Autobiography, detailed the singular reason for his father’s defeat.
Professor Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected his telegraph and sent his first message over the wires in 1838. All that was needed, according to Morse, was a long-distance trial which he was unable to fund by himself. As a last resort, he applied to Congress for an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars in 1842. A bill was introduced and then referred to a special committee of five, with David Wallace being one of the Representatives. The committee was fairly evenly split on its support of the Morse experiment.
As Morse was stretching a wire from the House chamber to the Senate Chamber for a demonstration a rushed vote was organized for the committee. There were only four members of the committee present in the House at that moment because David Wallace was watching the set-up in the Senate chamber. Although Representative Wallace did not understand the technology, he witnessed the sending of and reply to several messages while in the Senate chamber.
When he heard of the impending vote, Wallace rushed to the House chamber just as the tie vote of two for and two against the appropriation was about to be approved which would have killed the bill. David Wallace quickly voted in the affirmative to approve moving the appropriation bill forward. The House and Senate ultimately passed the special appropriation bill that would have died without Wallace’s one vote.
David Wallace was nominated by his party to serve a second term in 1843, but Morse had not yet completed his long-distance public demonstration of the telegraph. Wallace’s Democratic opponent, William J. Brown, campaigned vigorously denouncing the great expense of $30,000 that David Wallace had cost the country by his vote. Wallace’s strong support of internal improvements in Indiana prior to the Panic of 1837 had already proven an expense the State of Indiana struggled under so Hoosier audiences were receptive to Brown’s arguments. In hindsight, it’s not surprising that Wallace’s enthusiastic explanations of the intricacies of the operation of the telegraph and his ambitious projections regarding the impact of this newfangled invention on commerce, individuals, and society fell on deaf ears in rural Indiana. Wallace lost to Brown by 1,085 votes.
Samuel Morse used the $30,000 appropriation to stretch a telegraph wire from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. to the Mount Clare Depot in Baltimore. In an interesting final twist, a Hoosier was to play yet one more role in the history of the telegraph on May 24, 1844, when Annie Ellsworth of Lafayette selected the first message to be sent over telegraph lines from one city to another. She was the daughter of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, the Patent Commissioner, and Annie selected a verse from the Bible (Numbers 23:23) “What hath God wrought?”
Wallace continued to play a role in Indiana politics, but he never again held elective office. In just six years, over 12,000 miles of telegraph wires had been strung across the country. In 1857, recognizing his early support of the telegraph, David Wallace was invited to make the key address in Indianapolis’ celebration of the first trans-Atlantic cable between America and England. By this time, the telegraph was widely recognized as the wonder of the age, and those associated with it were held in great esteem. Unfortunately for all concerned, after a brief initial success, this first cable quit working, and it would be another nine years and many attempts before the trans-Atlantic cable was fully operational.
David died unexpectedly in September of 1859. While he lived to see many of the changes he envisioned wrought by the telegraph; he certainly never could have guessed how instant communication would change the world over the next 170 years. Imagine trying to explain these changes to those rural Hoosiers in 1843 who thought tweeting was for the birds!
