Richmond, Va.? He also sojourns with us until his duties to foreign masters are performed, and then is rewarded by promotion." (Patrick Kelly was a native of Ireland, and the first bishop of Richmond, Virginia. When after a couple of years, differences regarding questions of jurisdiction arose between him and Ambrose Maréchal, Archbishop of Baltimore, Kelly was offered the recently vacant See of Waterford and Lismore in his homeland.) Pro-slavery In the 1850s, Morse became well known as a defender of slavery, considering it to be sanctioned by God. In his treatise "An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery," he wrote: Later years Litigation over telegraph patent In the United States, Morse held his telegraph patent for many years, but it was both ignored and contested. In 1853, The Telegraph Patent case – O'Reilly v. Morse came before the U.S. Supreme Court where, after very lengthy investigation, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Morse had been the first to combine the battery, electromagnetism, the electromagnet, and the correct battery configuration into a workable practical telegraph. However, in spite of this clear ruling, Morse still received no official recognition from the United States government. The Supreme Court did not accept all of Morse's claims. The O'Reilly v. Morse case has become widely known among patent lawyers because the Supreme Court explicitly denied Morse's claim 8 for any and all use of the electromagnetic force for purposes of transmitting intelligible signals to any distance. The Supreme Court sustained, however, Morse's claim to such telecommunication when effectuated by means of Morse's inventive "repeater" apparatus. This was an electrical circuit in which a cascade of many sets comprising a relay and a battery were connected in series, so that when each relay closed, it closed a circuit to cause the next battery to power the succeeding relay, as suggested in the accompanying figure. This caused Morse's signal to pass along the cascade without degrading into noise as its amplitude decreased with the distance traveled. (Each time the amplitude of the signal approaches the noise level, the repeater [in effect, a nonlinear amplifier] boosts the signal amplitude well above the noise level.) This use of "repeaters" permitted a message to be sent to great distances, which was previously not feasible. The Supreme Court thus held that Morse could properly claim a patent monopoly on the system or process of transmitting signals at any