Samuel Morse Born: Painter Turned Telegraph Pioneer

Samuel Morse was a portrait painter before he was an inventor. Born on April 27, 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of the Calvinist preacher and geographer Jedidiah Morse, he studied at Yale and then at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was a talented painter who earned commissions from prominent Americans, including a portrait of President James Monroe. His artistic ambitions were genuine, and he spent years trying to establish himself as a history painter in the grand European tradition. The event that changed his life's direction occurred in 1825. He was in Washington, D.C., working on a commissioned portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette when a horse messenger arrived with a letter from his father informing him that his wife Lucilla was gravely ill. A second letter arrived the next day, telling him she had died. By the time Morse reached New Haven, she had already been buried. The grief transformed into an obsession with instantaneous communication. If he had known earlier, he could have been at her side. He spent the next 12 years developing an electric telegraph system and a code of dots and dashes for transmitting messages. He was not the only person working on electric telegraphy, but his system was the one that worked practically and commercially. Congress funded a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent the first message: "What hath God wrought." The telegraph revolutionized communication, commerce, and warfare. Within two decades, telegraph wires connected continents. Morse became wealthy from patent licenses and spent his later years in philanthropy and political controversy, supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War from his home in New York.