Moreover the person who is to be the inventor must be free from the exactions of well-compensated, everyday, absorbing duties--perhaps he must have had the final baptism of poverty.
"Now the inventor of the registering telegraph did not rise from the perusal of any brilliant paper; he happened to be at leisure on shipboard, ready to contribute and share in the after-dinner conversation of a ship's cabin, when the occasion arose.

Morse's electro-magnetic telegraph was mainly an invention employing powers and agencies through mechanical devices to produce a given end.

It involved the combination of the results of the labors of others with a succession of special contrivances and some discoveries of the inventor himself.

There was an ideal whole almost at the outset, but involving great thought, and labor, and patience, and invention to produce an art harmonious in its organization and action." After a voyage of over a month Morse reached home and landed at the foot of Rector Street on November 15, 1832.

His two brothers, Sidney and Richard, met him on his arrival, and were told at once of his invention.
His brother Richard thus described their meeting:-- "Hardly had the usual greetings passed between us three brothers, and while on our way to my house, before he informed us that he had made, during his voyage, an important invention, which had occupied almost all his attention on shipboard--one that would astonish the world and of the success of which he was perfectly sanguine; that this invention was a means of communicating intelligence by electricity, so that a message could be written down in a permanent manner by characters at a distance from the writer.