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History
of the Vail Lever Correspondent Key
The first telegraph key shown on your site would appear to be a Vail
Lever Correspondent. It was designed and made for the Morse
Printing Telegraph Company during Alfred Vail's tenure as Engineering
Assistant
to Samuel FB Morse. Even though the patent may have belonged
to the Company it's design and construction were entirely the work of
Alfred Vail as was the "Morse Code" itself. The Smithsonian
Institution has one of the two original Vail Lever Correspondent keys
in it's collection and it is named as such.
The
code devised by Samuel Morse assigned a number to every word in common
usage in the English language. It was several hundred pages
in length and would have been very cumbersome and slow to
use. It was
never actually used.
Vail
came up with the alphabetic substitution code which became the "Morse
Printing Telegraph Company" code; i.e. 'Morse Code'; which was actually
used on land telegraph lines as well as on coastal and Great Lakes
vessels in the Canada and the United States until the railroads ceased
the use of telegraphy circa 1960. Railroads were the last
users of manual land line telegraphy in North America.
If
there were any fairness in the excepted narrative of the history of the
telegraph many of the devices used in those systems would be called
Vail - devices. Morse deserves the credit he gets as the
individual who brought the basic principals of electromagnetism to the
sending of textual messages by wire. It was Alfred Vail who
devised and built the actual instruments used as well as the code which
the system used. If you go to the Smithsonian Institution web
site and search for Telegraph keys you will find the one in your first
picture clearly marked as a Vail Lever Correspondent. It was
two Vail Lever Correspondent keys which were used in the first
demonstration of the Telegraph to Congress and Alfred Vail was the
operator which was at the Baltimore Railroad Station end of that first
telegraph circuit. The well known painting depicts the
Library of Congress end of the circuit with Samuel Morse as the
operator. But the keys that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail used
were both
a "Vail Lever Correspondent."
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Tom Horne
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