How did samuel morse die

Born April 27, 1791

Charlestown, Massachusetts

Died April 2, 1872

New York, New York

American inventor

"What hath God wrought?"

—First long-distance telegraph message, transmitted from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse gave his name to a long-dominant means of communicating via telegraph—Morse code—and is credited with inventing the telegraph used in the United States. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was persuading the federal government to help pay for construction of a demonstration telegraph, a critical step in launching a new era of instantaneous communications across long distances.

There was little about Morse's first four decades that would have suggested that his name would be linked to an engineering accomplishment that changed the way the world communicated—and even foretold the era of E-mail over the Internet. Nevertheless, it is Morse who is credited with inventing Morse code, a method of communication that uses a series of dots and dashes—short sounds and longer ones—that is fundamentally similar to the zeros and ones used by today's computers communicating over the Internet.

Rapid long-distance communications may not seem, at first, like a central part of the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic development that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. But as soon as production of finished goods started to become centralized in factories, new needs arose in communications. Factories needed to order supplies from far away, as well as receive orders from distant customers. Business owners saw an advantage in quickly finding out about price changes in manufactured goods or raw materials, or about other developments affecting the supply and demand of goods. And fast-moving trains needed a way to control traffic and avoid head-on collisions when there was only one set of rails shared by trains going in both directions.

At the time when Morse developed his famous code, he was one of many people working on the concept. It was, in the end, not just his code, or the invention of the telegraph itself that counted. What counted was Morse's success in selling the idea to the U.S. Congress, persuading the government to help him fund the project, and thereby attracting world attention to his first message sent over a primitive telegraph system from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland.

Early life as a painter

Samuel Morse, known to his family by his middle name, Finley, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, outside Boston, in 1791. His father was a Congregationalist minister who was highly regarded but not highly paid. Morse attended Yale University, from which he graduated in 1810. While there, he learned something of the then-new science of electricity, and he made some primitive batteries.

But science was not his chief interest; he was fascinated by art. Morse returned to the Boston area after graduation and took a job as a clerk in a bookstore. Shortly afterward he traveled to London, England, to study art. In the four years he spent in London, Morse got off to a good start. He won a prestigious award—the gold medal in a competition sponsored by the Adelphi Society of Art—and he studied under two American masters, Benjamin West (1738–1820) and Washington Allston (1779–1843), who were living in London at the time.

In 1815, though, his parents could no longer afford to help pay for his life abroad, and Morse reluctantly returned home. His plan was to earn a living by painting grand depictions of historical events, but he discovered there was not much money to be made in this area. Instead, in the era before photography, people who could afford it commissioned Morse to paint small portraits of themselves. Morse succeeded at this, painting such prominent figures as President James Monroe (1758–1831), the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), and Eli Whitney (1765–1825; see entry), inventor of the cotton gin. But he did not earn a lot of money at this sort of painting, and in any case he considered it an inferior form of art. He had an idea to paint a large scene featuring the entire U.S. House of Representatives, with recognizable portraits of about eighty members, but he could not find financial support.

Despite failure to achieve financial success as a painter, Morse was one of thirty artists who founded the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1826. Morse was elected president of the academy, and held the office for thirty-nine years, long after his interests had turned to another subject: the telegraph.

Passing time on an ocean cruise

Morse returned to Europe for three years, from 1829 to 1832, to perfect his painting technique. On his return, he settled in New York City, where he was appointed professor of the arts at the University of the City of New York (now called New York University).

It was in 1832, sailing home from his second European visit, that Morse heard of a new discovery: the electromagnet. The English scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) had discovered that electric current passing through a coil of wire could magnetize a piece of metal and cause it to attract metal objects. This gave Morse an idea: by varying electric current flowing through a wire, a magnet many miles away could move a piece of metal. And that metal could record a message, for example, by tapping a strip of paper.

The telegraph, as it was eventually developed, thus combined two ideas: electromagnetism and its ability to move objects remotely; and a scheme to translate those movements into words.

Morse's idea was to use a combination of short and long electric pulses to transmit a message. Each letter of the alphabet would be represented as a unique combination of long and short impulses—dots and dashes as they were later called. These combinations made up Morse code.

For example, the letter "e" is represented by a single dot: • . An "a" is a dot and a dash: • - . An "s" is three dots: • • • . A "y" is represented by a dash followed by a dot followed by two dashes: - • - -. The word "easy" would therefore be sent as the sequence • / • - / • • • / - • - - .

It took Morse about three years, until 1835, to get his first model telegraph working. He used materials he found at hand: an old canvas stretcher, a home-made battery, the works from an old clock.

Morse was not the first person to get a telegraph-like device working. Models had been proposed and implemented as early as 1753. But most of the earlier models involved multiple wires; the first one required twenty-six wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. In 1833 German engineers developed a model that required only five wires. Morse's innovation was to reduce the number of wires to one; he did this through the famous code that bears his name.

Samuel Morse the Politician

The success of the telegraph brought Samuel Morse fame and wealth, and soon, his interests turned to politics. Morse had a brief and unsuccessful political career in New York, running for office as a Nativist, one who favors native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1836, garnering 1,550 votes, and again in 1841, when he received fewer than 100 votes.

The Nativists, who were also known as "Know-Nothings," were disturbed by the surge of immigrants into the United States in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Many of the immigrants were from countries other than England, and they began to change the face of the American population.

The platform of the Nativists included intense nationalism (sometimes called jingoism), racism, opposition to immigration, and opposition to Catholics and Jews. Morse made no apologies for views that in the early twenty-first century would be unacceptable to the majority of Americans.

In particular, he was fiercely anti-Catholic and, because many Irish immigrants were Catholics, anti-Irish. Morse favored denying citizenship to people born outside of the United States. He also wrote pamphlets opposing those who would abolish slavery.

Money, please

Morse's second great contribution to the advancement of rapid communications was his 1842 success in persuading the U.S. Congress to contribute federal government funds to help build a single-wire telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. Congress agreed to pay $30,000 (the equivalent of about $500,000 in 2000) to string the wire.

On May 11, 1844, Morse used the wire to send what is regarded as the first telegraph message from city to city. Sitting in the U.S. Supreme Court, Morse sent his famous first message a distance of forty-one miles to the Mount Clair train station in Baltimore. The text was a passage from a Bible owned by the daughter of the commissioner of patents: "What hath God wrought?"

Further demonstrations soon followed. People sent their names by telegraph from Baltimore to Washington and saw them come back again within a minute. Two people forty miles apart conducted an argument via telegraph messages. Results of a Democratic convention in Baltimore reached the nation's capital almost immediately. To people in the 1840s, the telegraph was nothing less than a miracle of instant communications.

Although the first telegraph message is closely linked to Morse, he was not the only person involved in its success. Morse was not an engineer by training, and he received advice and help from others, notably his assistants Alfred Vail and William Baxter, and the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878), who demonstrated a working telegraph in 1831, a full year before Morse even got started. Europeans also had made advances in telegraphy, especially Louis Breguet (1804–1883) of France. It was Vail who received Morse's famous first message in Baltimore, and he is often credited with refining Morse's code to the famous pattern of dots and dashes, which enabled a receiver to "hear" a message and transcribe it into letters. (Morse's original machine printed the dots and dashes on a long, thin strip of paper, from which the code was then interpreted by sight.)

Nevertheless, it was Morse who filed for a patent, which guarantees the inventor exclusive rights to make money on the invention, for a printing telegraph in 1844; the patent was granted in 1849.

The impact of the telegraph

Although it took Morse years to get the funding to string a telegraph wire between Baltimore, Maryland, and



Washington, D.C., his invention spread across the country fairly quickly after that first message was transmitted. Within ten years there were about twenty-three thousand miles of telegraph wire in operation, mostly following the route of railroad tracks. By 1868 the first underwater cable linking Europe and the United States had been laid.

Like many inventors, Morse complained about having to defend his patents against businesspeople who wanted to exploit the invention without paying for it. Eventually, Morse became a shareholder in the American Telegraph Company, which became the dominant company offering telegraphy in the United States.

Other inventors continued to make improvements, notably by multiplexing, or sending multiple messages across one wire at the same time. One of Thomas Edison's (1847–1931) first inventions was something called a stock ticker, in essence a machine that printed stock prices sent by telegraph.

Rapid communications was a critical component to the development of the Industrial Revolution. Combined with the spread of railroads, it enabled companies to expand greatly the market for their products. Merchants could order manufactured goods from hundreds, or thousands, of miles away, and expect confirmation within hours; delivery came shortly thereafter as the railroads expanded their service. Especially for a geographically large area such as the United States, the telegraph was a key development in the growth of manufacturing.

The telegraph also played a key role in the operation of financial markets, enabling investors across the country virtually "real-time" access to stock prices and news that might affect their decision to invest in one company or another. The ability to tap the savings and investment of the entire country became crucial in raising the huge amounts of capital (money) needed to sustain the Industrial Revolution.

In his later years, Morse was a noted philanthropist, one who benefits others through charitable gifts. The telegraph operators of the United States honored Morse with a bronze statue in New York's Central Park in 1871. Morse died in New York the following year.

For More Information

Books

Coe, Lewis. The Telegraph: A History of Morse's Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.

Hays, Wilma Pitchford. Samuel Morse and the Electronic Age. New York: Watts, 1966.

Kerby, Mona. Samuel Morse. New York: F. Watts, 1991.

Periodicals

Forbes, Steve. "Telegraphic Lesson: Don't Depend on Uncle Sam." Forbes, July 5, 1993, p. 26.

Frost, George. "Let's Remember Sam." Journal of the Patent and TrademarkOffice Society, April 1994, p. 277.

Web Sites

"The Invention Dimension: Samuel F. B. Morse" Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (accessed on February 13, 2003).

Locust Grove, the Samuel F. B. Morse Historic Site. (accessed on February 13, 2003).

"The Papers of Samuel F. B. Morse." American Memory, Library of Congress. (accessed on February 13, 2003).