secured early funding for it. His telegraph could transmit thirty characters per minute. In May 1845, the Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed in order to build telegraph lines from New York City toward Philadelphia; Boston; Buffalo, New York; and the Mississippi. Telegraphic lines rapidly spread throughout the United States in the next few years, with 12,000 miles of wire laid by 1850. Morse at one time adopted Wheatstone and Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting an electrical telegraph signal through a body of water or down steel railroad tracks or anything conductive. He went to great lengths to win a lawsuit for the right to be called "inventor of the telegraph" and promoted himself as being an inventor. But Alfred Vail also played an important role in the development of the Morse code, which was based on earlier codes for the electromagnetic telegraph. Patent Morse received a patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace (the present Beylerbeyi Palace was built in 1861–1865 on the same location) in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid, who personally tested the new invention. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1849. The original patent went to the Breese side of the family after the death of Samuel Morse. In 1856, Morse went to Copenhagen and visited the Thorvaldsens Museum, where the sculptor's grave is in the inner courtyard. He was received by King Frederick VII, who decorated him with the Order of the Dannebrog for the telegraph. Morse expressed his wish to donate his Thorvaldsen portrait from 1831 in Rome to the king. The Thorvaldsen portrait today belongs to Margrethe II of Denmark. The Morse telegraphic apparatus was officially adopted as the standard for European telegraphy in 1851. Only the United Kingdom (with its extensive overseas empire) kept the needle telegraph of Cooke and Wheatstone. In 1858, Morse introduced wired communication to Latin America when he established a telegraph system in Puerto Rico, then a Spanish Colony. Morse's oldest daughter, Susan Walker Morse (1819–1885), would often visit her uncle Charles Pickering Walker, who owned the Hacienda Concordia in the town of Guayama. During one of her visits, she met Edward Lind, a Danish merchant who worked in his brother-in-law's Hacienda La Henriqueta in the town of Arroyo. They later married. Lind purchased the Hacienda from his sister when she became