Samuel F. B. Morse was born in Charleston, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregational minister. Morse was an intellectually gifted youth who entered Yale at the age of fourteen. He majored in art, his first passion, but also attended other lectures, including ones on electricity. He earned money in college painting small portraits of his friends. Following graduation, Morse briefly served as a bookseller’s apprentice but received his parents’ blessing to attend the Royal Academy of Arts in England. He met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and several future American and British painters and actors, acquaintances that began for Morse a life-long series of friendships with famous persons in the world of politics, education, invention, and the arts.
Morse returned to the United States in 1815 and divided his time between New England, Washington, D. C., and the South. He was a talented artist and fulfilled a number of painting commissions for portraits of such notables as President James Monroe, Eli Whitney, and Noah Webster. After his marriage in 1818, Morse spent more than a year painting a large scene of the House of Representatives in the Capitol Rotunda.
Morse eventually moved to New York City to seek additional opportunities. The City of New York commissioned him for $1,000 to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette during the French patriot’s final visit to America. Morse poured himself into a number of activities. He served as President of the New York Drawing Association and the National Academy of Design. Morse also helped create the publications Journal of Commerce and Academics of Art. He also remained attracted by developments in electricity, particularly the invention of the electromagnet, and attended a number of lectures on the field at the New York Athenaeum.
In the late 1820s, after a series of personal tragedies that included the deaths of his first wife, son, and both parents, Morse sailed to Europe to ease his grief and pursue other painting ventures and study in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. However, Morse’s career soon took another course. In the early 1830s the American scientist Joseph Henry had discovered the powerful property of electromagnetism created through many layers of insulated wires. He demonstrated how magnetic signals could be sent over long distances, the first suggestion of the telegraph. On his voyage home from Europe, Morse had lengthy conversations with Charles T. Jackson, a Boston physician, who informed him of Henry’s and simultaneous European experiments regarding electromagnetism. An intrigued Morse began sketching his idea of how to use electromagnetism to transmit messages with a dot and dash system.
After returning to the United States, he immediately began work on what would become his claim to fame—the telegraph. In 1836 Morse constructed a recording telegraph and demonstrated it for Dr. Leonard Gale, Professor of Science at New York University. He used a series of relays to open and close the switches further away through the use of magnets—a fundamental principle in the telegraph system. Gale became his partner, and by 1837 a message could be sent through ten miles of wire reels in the professor’s university lecture room. After witnessing a demonstration, Morse’s friend, Alfred Vail, joined the team. Vail possessed substantial financial resources through his family’s iron works. These three men formed an important collaboration that led to Morse’s perfection of the telegraph. Morse spent seven years toying with different approaches to his design. He demonstrated his telegraph to friends and colleagues, spending nearly his entire savings on his project. At one time his net worth dropped to $0.37! He eventually obtained financial support from several investors, partnerships, and the sale of a few paintings.
Morse ran into other trouble. Charles T. Jackson, the man with whom Morse had conversed on his sail home from Europe, made claims that he, not Morse, was the inventor of the telegraph. Morse obtained statements from passengers of the ship who supported his bid, and he filed for his patent in the fall of 1837. Unfortunately, this incident began a long series of court battles that would drain time, monetary resources, and energy from Morse’s efforts to perfect his system.
As the tempo of developments related to the telegraph increased, Morse decided to abandon his painting work and concentrate solely on the device. He modified his approach. His telegraphic dictionary initially had words represented by number codes. He switched to using a code for each letter, a technique that made it unnecessary to encode and decode every word. In early 1838 he demonstrated his telegraph for several groups including scientists at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, members of the U. S. House of Representatives Commerce Committee whose chairman was F. O. J. Smith of Maine, and President Martin Van Buren and his cabinet. Smith was so impressed that he sponsored a bill to fund $30,000 to construct a fifty-mile telegraph line. Smith did not reveal to his colleagues that he had purchased part interest in Morse’s telegraph, but the bill failed.
This legislative failure left his American effort flagging, thus Morse journeyed once again to Europe to secure additional patents. He visited England, Russia, and France and succeeded only in the latter Country. While in Paris he met Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the Daguerreotype, and published the first U. S. description of this style of photography. Morse returned to America, finally secured a U. S. patent for the telegraph, opened up a daguerreotype studio, and taught the process to a small number of individuals, including Matthew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer.
In the early 1840s, an undeterred Morse conducted further experiments with the telegraph. His original instrument worked by printing the message on a piece of ribbon paper through the use of a pendulum and electromagnet that produced a series of ridged slugs in the form of dots and dashes in a distinctive pattern for each letter of the alphabet according to a code Morse had devised. The message produced then was given to a decoding official who translated the message. By 1845 Morse had modified his receiver so that trained telegraphers listening to the noise pattern in a sounding box could record the message quickly. Morse also thought into the future and realized that some signals would be required to be sent to points separated by bodies of water. He experimented with laying several miles of cable underwater between Battery Park and Governor’s Island in New York and successfully transmitted a signal between the two sites.
Morse gave additional demonstrations to officials in Newark, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D. C. Congress expressed renewed interest in his invention. In 1843 after an extremely close vote, eighty-nine to eighty-three with seventy Congressmen not voting, the House of Representatives appropriated $30,000 for an experimental 41 mile telegraph line between Washington, D. C. and Baltimore. The construction initially employed underground lines in lead pipes, but that approach proved unworkable so Morse shifted to the use of a single wire strung on glass insulators that were mounted on trees or poles placed above ground. The mastermind behind the installation was Ezra Cornell, whose fortune led him later to found Cornell University. Morse was now ready for the most important moment in the telegraph’s development. On May 24, 1844 he sent a message from the Supreme Court chamber in the U. S. Capitol in Washington, D. C. to his assistant Alfred Vail waiting at the B&O Railroad Depot in Baltimore, Maryland. The message when decoded stated, ‘‘What hath God Wrought?’’3
Morse gave credit for the message to Annie Elsworth, the daughter of a friend, who took the quote from the Old Testament passage: Numbers 23:23. The initial test left Morse humbled. A week later he wrote his brother in a very pensive tone obviously feeling great pride but also a sense of major responsibility from what he described as ‘‘an astonishing invention.’’4 Furthermore, in the fall of 1844, Morse cautioned Alfred Vail against use of the device to promote partisanship.
Following Morse’s demonstration, telegraph developments moved rapidly. An event in Britain proved the benefit of the new technology. In 1845 John Tawell murdered his mistress and attempted to escape by train to London. However, telegraph operators wired ahead his description to London police officials who apprehended Tawell as he stepped off the train. In the same year, Morse picked Amos Kendall, the U. S. Postmaster-General, to join his investment team as his agent. By 1846 this collaboration resulted in the creation of the Magnetic Telegraph Company and the extension of telegraph technology to connect Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Buffalo. However, Morse had to fight patent infringement in the United States as a flurry of telegraph companies appeared in the late 1840s, some constructing their lines parallel to his earlier ones. In 1848 six New York City daily newspapers formed the Associated Press to share the cost of telegraphing news. By 1850 nearly two dozen telegraph companies and 12,000 miles of wire had been laid in the United States. The Supreme Court, however, upheld Morse’s patent in 1854 and extended his sole possession of telegraphy for seven years, and the challenges to his system waned.
During the 1850s and 1860s Morse’s invention experienced remarkable growth. In 1852 the telegraph linked London and Paris. By 1853 Florida was the only state east of the Mississippi River that did not have the telegraph. In the mid 1850s the British and French governments used the telegraph to communicate with commanders in the field during the Crimean War. Furthermore, serious efforts began to connect the United States and Europe. Morse and Cyrus W. Fields became partners to lay a transatlantic cable. On its fourth attempt, Queen Victoria transmitted a message to President James Buchanan but the cable broke several weeks later. However, ten European countries paid Morse 400,000 French francs to use his invention. In 1859 the Magnetic Telegraph Company merged with Field’s American Telegraph Company. In 1861 Union and Confederate forces adopted the telegraph to communicate while conducting military operations. In the same year a transcontinental telegraph extended to California. By 1865 the International Telegraph Union had formed to establish rules, regulations, and standards for the telegraph industry. In 1866 the transatlantic cable was successfully laid, and a second one was soon added. By 1880 more than 100,000 miles of undersea cable had been laid across the globe. Also in 1866 the rival Western Union Telegraph Company merged with the American Telegraph Company to create the largest U. S. telegraph company.
Samuel Morse was a remarkable individual whose early career as an artist provided no hint of his future development of the telegraph System, one of the most important inventions in an era dominated by men of remarkable technical ingenuity. Morse was a highly complex person. Besides his artistic and technical pursuits, he had a great interest in politics, twice running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York on an anti-immigrant platform and once losing a Congressional bid from the Poughkeepsie district in New York. However, Morse, unlike many other inventors, achieved wide acclaim in his lifetime. He received accolades and awards from the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Prussia, Austria, and Italy, as well as from the Sultan of Turkey. In addition, important scientific societies and associations in France, Belgium, and the United States granted him special recognition, and Yale University awarded him the degree of Doctor of Laws. In 1871, a year before his death, New York City unveiled a statue of Morse. The inventor fittingly sent a farewell message around the globe—a world his telegraph had connected. The man who had spent nearly every penny on his ingenious idea lived the last decades of his life comfortably on a 200-acre estate along the upper Hudson River. What had God Wrought? Indeed!
World History
