What do you think of the plan?
If Mr.Prosch will make me a first-rate, most perfect machine, and as speedily as possible, and will wait six or nine months for his pay, you may order one for me.
Morse's reply to this letter has not been preserved, but he probably agreed to Vail's proposition,--anything honorable to keep the telegraph in the public eye,--for, as we shall see, in a later letter he refers to the machines which Prosch was to make.

Before quoting from that letter, however, I shall give the following sentences from one to Baron Meyendorff, of March 18, 1840: "I have, since I returned to the United States, made several important improvements, which I regret my limited time will not permit me to describe or send you....

I have so changed the _form_ of the apparatus, and condensed it into so small a compass, that you would scarcely know it for the same instrument which you saw in Paris." This and many other allusions, in the correspondence of those years, to Morse's work in simplifying and perfecting his invention, some of which I have already noted, answer conclusively the claims of those who have said that all improvements were the work of other brains and hands.
On September 7, 1840, he writes again to Vail:-- "Your letter of 28th ult.

was received several days ago, but I have not had a moment's time to give you a word in return.

I am tied hand and foot during the day endeavoring to realize something from the Daguerreotype portraits....