Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts on April 27, 1791, Samuel Finley Breese Morse improved the telegraph. Morse developed an interest in art and electricity while studying at Yale College. After graduating in 1810, he focused on painting in England. He’d subsequently become a famous portraitist.
In 1825, he founded and was the first president of the National Academy of Design in New York. He also ran for mayor of New York twice but lost both times. Morse and his brother Sidney Edwards Morse submitted three patents for pumps in 1817. In 1832, he started interested in telegraphy.
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Morse was on a voyage from Europe to America when he overheard a talk about electromagnetics that inspired his electric telegraph concept. Despite his lack of electrical background, he understood that electrical pulses can transmit data via cables. At the time, the telegraph was a slightly different machine. It was initially suggested in 1753 and completed in 1774, requiring 26 different cables, one for each letter of the alphabet. Morse intended to be the first to utilize just one wire.
Between 1832 and 1837, he built an electric telegraph using a homemade battery and ancient clockwork gears. He also had two collaborators: Leonard Gale, a scientist at New York University, and Alfred Vail, a mechanic who lent his expertise and his family’s New Jersey ironworks to improve telegraph models.
Morse’s initial telegraph, introduced in 1837, used a single wire to generate an EKG-like line on the ticker tape. Morse’s lexicon was used to decode the line’s dips into letters and numbers. The following year, he designed a dot-and-dash code that employed various integers to represent the English alphabet and 10 numerals. This coding technique was superior because it could be “sound read” by operators without printing or decoding. In 1838, at a New York telegraph demonstration, Morse sent ten words per minute using the Morse code.
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Morse persuaded Congress to fund his “wire” project with $30,000 in 1842. Morse also sought and received help from American and European telegraphy professionals, notably Princeton’s Joseph Henry, who created a functioning telegraph in 1831. Morse applied for a printing telegraph patent in 1844. His invention had previously been tested over small distances, and the cash he obtained enabled him to run a cable from Baltimore to Washington. Morse transmitted the first inter-city transmission in 1844. Soon after, he made his first public appearance, sending a message from the Supreme Court chamber to the Mount Clair railway terminal in Baltimore. By 1846, private businesses had established telegraph lines from Washington to Boston and Buffalo.
The telegraph spread faster than the railways, whose tracks the wires often followed. By 1854, 23,000 miles of telegraph wire were in use. Western Union was created in 1851, and the first trans-Atlantic cable connection was completed in 1866. While Morse did not invent the telegraph or establish Morse Code, he was a major supporter of the technology and its global spread. He died of pneumonia in New York on April 2, 1872.
