Morse, Samuel F. B. (1791-1872) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Samuel Finley Breese Morse is recognized as the most influential figure in the development of the electromagnetic telegraph. It is interesting to note that although Morse is remembered as an inventor, he endeavored most of his life to become a great artist.

Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1791, to Elizabeth Breese Morse and Jedidiah Morse. His mother was a strong-willed individual who held tremendous influence over Morse and his two brothers, Sidney and Richard. His father, the town pastor, was also active as an author and geographer.

Morse learned of electricity while attending the lectures of Jeremiah Day at Yale University. Nevertheless, he wanted to become an artist, and he was fortunate to be acquainted with the American painter Washington Allston. Morse's parents supported his ambition to travel with Allston to London to further his training. There, Morse assumed Allston's practice of sculpting the images of his paintings. His first sculpture, Dying Hercules (1812), earned Morse international recognition from the Adelphi Society of Arts in London.

Morse began a prolific career in portraiture after marrying Lucretia Pickering Walker and establishing a residence in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1818. Morse and his brother Sidney dabbled briefly in invention, but their failed attempts motivated Morse to refocus on painting and the New York art community after moving to New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1820s. In late 1824, Morse received word that the Common Council of the City of New York had chosen him to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette during his tour of the United States. In February 1825, while Morse was in Washington, D.C., for a sitting for the painting, he received word of his wife's death and quickly returned to New Haven. His father died shortly thereafter, and a distraught Morse moved to New York. In November 1825, he and thirty other artists founded what would eventually become known as the National Academy of Design. Morse, who served as the first president of the academy, completed the painting of Lafayette in 1826. (That portrait now hangs in New York's City Hall, and the related bust is in the possession of the New York City Public Library.)

In November 1829, with his three children entrusted to the care of various family members, Morse decided to leave New York for a three-year tour of Europe. While in France, Morse met with Louis Daguerre. (Morse, impressed with Daguerre's precursor to modern photography, eventually opened his own daguerreotype studio in New York, where he taught Mathew Brady, the famed American Civil War photographer.) While in France, Morse also had seen the Chappe semaphore telegraph, which was a visual signaling device that used movable arms on tall masts. Morse was intrigued still with the signaling device when he boarded the Sully, the ship on which he returned to New York from Le Havre, France, in 1832. Aboard ship, Morse met and held long discussions with Charles T. Jackson concerning his ideas for a form of telegraphy that used electricity. Later, each would make claims to the invention ofthe electromagnetic telegraph. While Morse provided more evidence for his claims than Jackson did, the evidence revealed that neither could claim sole credit for the invention.

Morse began teaching art at New York University in 1835. While there, he began developing his telegraph. Early in 1836, Morse attempted to make the model work through forty feet of wire, but such early attempts failed. Leonard D. Gale, a professor of chemistry at the university, became interested in Morse's work. Gale helped Morse correct many problems in his model. Another important contributor to the Morse telegraph was Alfred Vail (a former art student of Morse), who understood mechanical engineering. Vail provided technical assistance, funds, and facilities in Speed-well, New Jersey, for equipment construction. Although many historians argue that Gale and Vail probably provided most of the innovation for Morse's final working product, each received small shares of the patent for the telegraph, the caveat of which was filed by Morse on October 3, 1837.

On March 4,1843, the U.S. Congress provided approximately $30,000 for the construction of a telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The original idea was to lay telegraph lines underwater and underground, but wire insulation was too unreliable. As an alternate, Vale and Ezra Cornell (the designer of the plow Morse used for burying cable) suggested stringing wire overhead on poles. Finally, on May 24, 1844, the line opened with the message "What hath God wrought!"

Morse had attempted to develop a telegraph code in 1832 using dots and dashes to represent actual words, but that method proved too cumbersome. American Morse Code, which uses dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers directly,was developed in 1844. In 1850, sound reading of Morse code replaced visual reading of telegraph tape. Continental code, which transmits better through undersea cables, was adopted in 1851.

At the age of fifty-five, when he was a superintendent of the Washington-Baltimore telegraph, Morse proposed to finish a panel of art in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Morse ended his art career with the rejection of that proposal. While in his late fifties, Morse married Sarah Elizabeth Griswold, his second cousin, with whom he had four children. Their marriage was overshadowed by intense patent litigation against Morse and his telegraph.

Versions of electric telegraphy had been developed as early as 1774. Several versions of telegraphy appeared almost simultaneously after Hans Christian Oersted's discovery of electromagnetism in 1819. Models were developed in England by Peter Barlow and Charles Wheatstone in 1824 and 1837, respectively. Wheatstone became involved with others in the United States in litigation against Morse, his patent, and his claim to be the inventor of the electric telegraph. Joseph Henry was found to have produced a working model in 1831; Harrison Gray Dyar strung telegraph wires on poles in Long Island for his static electricity model in 1827. While these cases illustrated clearly that other individuals had created working electric telegraphs before Morse had, the courts determined that none of the other innovators had applied for U.S. patents for models that were direct challenges to Morse's design.

Morse died on April 2, 1872, in his winter home in New York. Based on the facts of his life history, it might be more appropriate if Morse were remembered predominantly as the artist who helped to found the National Academy of Design rather than as the inventor of the telegraph. This would certainly have been the view of those people who criticized Morse and alleged that he had claimed the work of others as his own. Nevertheless, his efforts did lead to the worldwide adoption of a common system of telegraphy.

Telephone Industry, History Of.

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

Harlow, Alvin F. (1936). Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company.

Mabee, Carleton. (1943). The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Morse, Edward Lind, ed. (1973). Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, 2 vols. New York: Da Capo Press.

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