Samuel Morse

Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27, 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts. At Yale College, Morse was an indifferent student, but his interest was aroused by lectures of the then newly-developing subject of electricity, and he delighted in painting miniature portraits. In 1832, while returning on the ship Sully from another period of art study in Europe, Morse heard a conversation about the newly discovered electromagnet and conceived of the idea of an electric telegraph. With the aid of Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, Morse applied for a patent for his new telegraph in 1837, which he described as including a dot and dash code to represent numbers. By 1838, at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York, Morse transmitted ten words per minute. Though changes in detail were to be made later, the Morse code that was to become standard throughout the world had essentially come into being. After Morse directed the wires to be set on poles instead, the work advanced well, and by May 1844, the first inter-city electromagnetic telegraph line in the world was ready. Then, from the Capitol building in Washington, Morse sent a Biblical quotation as the first formal message on the line to Baltimore, a message that revealed his own sense of wonder that God had chosen him to reveal the use of electricity to man: "What Hath God Wrought!" At the age of 80, he died of pneumonia in New York City in 1972. [ Source ] [ morse.pdf ]