Samuel Morse

Samuel Morse was an accomplished portrait painter until he was over forty, and then invented the electric telegraph and the code that bears his name. Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791, the son of a Calvinist minister and geographer, he studied at Yale, where he attended lectures on electricity, and trained as a painter in London at the Royal Academy. He was a serious artist. He painted portraits of Lafayette and of presidents, and founded and led the National Academy of Design. In 1825, while in Washington painting Lafayette, a messenger brought word that his wife was ill; by the time he reached New Haven she had died and been buried. The experience of news travelling slower than events stayed with him. On the ship home from Europe in 1832 he heard a conversation about electromagnetism and began sketching a device. He worked on it for years in poverty, assisted decisively by Leonard Gale, who applied Joseph Henry's work on relays to boost the signal over distance, and by Alfred Vail, who financed the work and contributed substantially to the code — the assignment of shorter sequences to commoner letters. He patented the telegraph in 1837 and demonstrated it to Congress, which after years of lobbying granted 30,000 dollars for a line from Washington to Baltimore. On 24 May 1844 he sent the message What hath God wrought. Telegraph lines spread across the United States within a decade, and the technology separated communication from transport for the first time in history. He fought long patent battles, grew wealthy, and gave to charity. His politics were unattractive: he defended slavery on scriptural grounds and ran for office on an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant platform. He died in 1872.

• Lived: 1791 CE – 1872 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: inventor, painter