On the other hand, in several letters to Morse he refers to it as being Morse's.

For instance, in a letter of April 20, 1848, he uses the words "your system of marking, _lines_ and _dots_, which you have patented." All the evidence brought forward by the advocates of Vail is purely hearsay; he is said to have said that he invented the alphabet.
Morse, however, always, in every one of his many written references to the matter, speaks of it as "my conventional alphabet." In an article which I contributed to the "Century Magazine" of March, 1912, I treated this question at length and proved by documentary evidence that Morse alone devised the dot-and-dash alphabet.

It will not be necessary for me to repeat all this evidence here; I shall simply give enough to prove conclusively that the Morse Alphabet has not been misnamed.
The following is a fugitive note which was reproduced photographically in the "Century" article:-- "Mr.Vail, in his work on the Telegraph, at p.

32, intimates that the saw-teeth type for letters, as he has described them in the diagram (9), were devised by me as early as the year 1832.

Two of the elements of these letters, indeed, were then devised, the dot and space, and used in constructing the type for numerals, but, so far as my recollection now serves me, it was not until I experimented with the first instrument in 1835 that I added the -- dash, which supplied me with the three elements for combinations for letters.