Samuel F. B. Morse

American inventor

• Born: April 27, 1791
• Birthplace: Charlestown, Massachusetts
• Died: April 2, 1872
• Place of death: New York, New York

As one of the primary inventors of the telegraph, Morse developed and implemented a system of electric communication that revolutionized the availability of information and forever changed the sense of world distances.

Early Life

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in the shadow of Boston, a center for politics and communication—pursuits that his own life and work would eventually revolutionize. The first son of the young Calvinist minister Jedidiah Morse and his New Jersey wife Elizabeth Breese, he was called Finley as he was growing up. Three years after he was born, a brother, Sidney Edwards, was born, and the next year, Richard Cary followed.

The Morses had great expectations of their sons, who were born into a family with a strong history of education: Their mother’s grandfather had been president of Princeton College, and their father, Pastor Morse, earned a degree from Yale and wrote the first geography text in America. When the boys started school, however, they showed distinctly different aptitudes for study. Their father characterized Finley as the hare, quick to lose interest and change paths; Sidney, he said, was the tortoise of the family, stubborn and steadfast; Richard, the youngest Morse to survive birth, was more like Sidney than he was like Finley. Though the younger siblings were of different temperaments, they would often later come to the aid of their older brother: easing his financial woes, caring for his children after his first wife’s death, and offering an editorial forum for discourses on the telegraph.

Morse’s parents believed that the discipline of education would benefit their firstborn. They sent him off to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, at the tender age of seven. His aptitude in the classroom was not legendary, though his aptitude for drawing proved somewhat greater and was encouraged by the family. By the time he studied at Yale, Morse was able to sponsor his affinity for cigars and wine with miniature portraits on ivory. Further encouragement from a meeting with the artist Washington Allston, whom Morse would later credit as his mentor, prompted him to set some goals. Young Morse yearned to go abroad to study painting with Allston and Benjamin West. With some persuasion, his parents agreed to send him to England. There, at the Royal Academy of London, he learned to work in other media: charcoal, marble, and oils. West lent his work a critical eye and often turned the callow artist back to finish works he had thought completed. Soon, England recognized his talent and diligence with a gold medal from the Adelphi Society of Arts for his sculpture of the dying Hercules.

Morse returned to the United States (via a nearly two-month voyage), convinced of the historical genre’s preeminence as “the intellectual branch of art.” Commissions of such works were not readily available, however, and he had to resort to portrait work for subsistence. His pursuit of commissions took him up and down the eastern seaboard. In Concord, Massachusetts, he met his bride-to-be, Lucretia Pickering Walker. The wedding was postponed until he could save enough money to set up winter housekeeping in Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been awarded a commission for a portrait of President James Monroe.

Charleston, however, was only a temporary residence, and eventually Morse was forced by impecunity to leave his wife in New Haven, where his entire family seemed to be toiling without benefit of regular salary. He traveled continually to paint and dreamed of the means to live in the same house as his wife and children. That dream was never realized while Lucretia lived. In fact, he learned of Lucretia’s death days after the event, while he was in Washington to paint the Marquis de Lafayette.

The Lafayette portrait, which hangs in New York’s city hall, is not without critical acclaim. At least one art historian deems it worthy of nomination to the Golden Age of American portrait painting. Portrait painting, especially for civic commission, offered a regular income, but the two large-scale historical works Morse hoped to exhibit for profit did not. Morse conceived of these historical pieces in a grand manner. One, Congress Hall , otherwise known as The Old House of Representatives, shows the National Hall during a session of Congress and includes likenesses of the congressmen, achieved from individual sittings, as well as Jedidiah Morse, Benjamin Silliman, and a Pawnee chief.

The other, The Louvre , shows a room at the museum, the Salon Carré, complete with more than forty great paintings. When he thought of these works initially (nearly ten years apart), Morse wanted to create something that would appeal to the common person, though the historical genre was to his mind the most elevated of art forms. With Congress Hall, Morse thought each man would at least recognize his representative and have an interest in seeing him at work. The Louvre, he thought, would open the treasures of the Old World to Americans, who were rarely privileged to see these masterpieces.

Morse dreamed of an additional historical commission to decorate panels at the new Capitol, but the commission went to someone else; in this case, perhaps, art’s loss directly contributed to science’s gain.

Life’s Work

When there is a question of who was the first to invent a machine or a process, research often shows more than one person working with similar ideas, though the one has no knowledge of the others’ works. Such was the case with the invention of the telegraph. In 1832, while Morse was returning from Europe aboard the packet ship Sully, isolated from libraries, laboratories, and scientific journals, he formulated his first hypotheses regarding the possibility of transmitting information by electric impulses.

Morse’s only formal education in matters of electricity had been lectures during his junior year at Yale when Silliman and Jeremiah Day gave demonstrations there. Morse himself experimented with electricity in the basements of Yale, apparently for reasons of native curiosity. Outside the classroom, Silliman, who was Morse’s neighbor, and James Dwight Dana, an acquaintance with more than passing knowledge of electromagnetism, rounded out Morse’s knowledge of electricity.

Long out of Yale by 1832, Morse had not read current scientific journals and was not aware that, at the same time, there were men experimenting in England with semaphore telegraphs—that is, those that worked with visual signals. On board the Sully, he was inspired in a conversation on electromagnetism with Dr. Charles T. Jackson to note that information could be sent electrically. With that grain of thought he began investigating possibilities for transforming the potential into a reality.

Morse’s shipboard sketch pad shows his early ideas for a code based on dots and dashes and for devices to send and record messages. Upon his arrival at his brother’s house in New York City, he began work on a prototype. With an old canvas stretcher and sawtooth type that he had forged at his sister-in-law’s hearth, he produced a rudimentary model of a machine that would make electricity useful to humankind. The forces that had confronted Morse as artist, however, now played upon Morse the inventor: The initial stroke of genius demanded systematic revisions and fresh income if it were to be developed fully. Nevertheless, Morse was too active to be incapacitated by despair over lack of remuneration for his art or invention. He was busy running the National Academy of Design (he was among its founders), running for mayor of New York, and accepting the first art professorship at New York University (NYU).

To further his telegraphic work, Morse contracted several partners. These partners agreed that any new discoveries made regarding the telegraph would become public under Morse’s name. The original partners, Leonard Dunnell Gale, Alfred Vail, and that cantankerous man, most often cast as a villain in stories of the telegraph, F. O. J. “Fog” Smith, contributed money and ideas to development of the telegraph.

Two crucial contributions by scientists made Morse’s telegraph work. A professor, Joseph Henry, had discovered a principle that, though made public in 1831, did not come to Morse’s attention until after he had made preliminary investigations. Henry discovered that increasing the number of turns in a coil increased the power of the current. Morse’s partner Gale, who brought Henry’s law to Morse’s attention, was responsible for persuading Morse to change his primitive battery, designed for quantity, into one of intensity. This factor, with Morse’s concept of an electric relay, enabled the telegraph to be effective over great distances.

Morse continued wrapping wires around and around his NYU studio, testing and demonstrating his remarkable new device. In 1837, he applied for his first telegraph patent in the form of a caveat to protect his preliminary inventions. They included a code of dots and dashes (to become, eventually, the “Morse code ”), a mechanism for sending information and another for receiving, a method of laying wire, and a code dictionary. During that same year, Morse began petitioning Congress to accept and implement his system on a national basis.

Congress let the initial telegraph offer pass it by as Morse set sail for Europe to secure foreign patent rights. Europe, though enthusiastic about the abilities of the electromagnetic telegraph, would not bless it with the official sanction of patent.

This European excursion, however, was not completely futile. Morse learned the newly discovered photographic process of Jacques Daguerre and resorted to it as a means to gain additional funds for his research concerning the telegraph. His trained artistic eye and his direct knowledge of the process from study with Daguerre in France made him an ideal teacher. In time, the success of Morse’s students, who literally kept him from the brink of starvation, earned for him the epithet “Father of Photography.”

Physically, Morse showed the effects of years of struggle. He looked haggard, and his clothes were shabby with wear. In this condition Morse returned to Washington, D.C., wooing Congress with demonstrations. At last, Congress awarded him money to build a line between Baltimore and Washington in 1843. This line reported to the Capitol the results of the national presidential conventions held in Baltimore and broadcast the first formal message, “What hath God wrought?”

After financial remuneration was forthcoming with the spread of lines across the country, Morse became the subject of suit and countersuit as others tried to claim rights of invention and expansion in this new and as yet unregulated field. Morse energetically fought off these attacks. His mind was active with thoughts of a transatlantic cable, a new wife, and a home in the country that he could share with his children. After the trials and disappointments of his earlier years, Morse lived to enjoy universal approbation and financial success. At the time of his death, on April 2, 1872, his invention was in use throughout the world.

Significance

Morse lived at the vanguard of a communications revolution. Trained as a painter, he combined knowledge of composition that would convey a message without words with the technology of Daguerre’s picture-taking method to train the men who would record the Civil War through the eye of the camera. The photographic images, along with the news of the war transmitted instantly by telegraph, reported the immediate and shocking news of the war to the folks at home. This ability to unite and make useful abstract theories is a trademark of the American inventor.

As a communicator, Morse was always ready to serve—through his portraits and historical genre paintings, through working on the public relations of trying to fund experimentation, and in having the foresight and magnanimity to encourage Congress to establish this new machine under the auspices of the postal system. Even when pressed with other responsibilities, he ran for mayor of New York City, appeared at the statue erection in Central Park, and helped found the National Academy of Design. In each case, his motivation was the desire to contribute to society rather than to promote himself.

Though Morse was a nativist, he worked to make the telegraph a force for international communication, and his success in making the world much smaller was clearly demonstrated in the memorial services held upon his death: Telegrams arrived at the nation’s capital from as far as Egypt and from all over the United States as well.

Bibliography

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Includes an examination of the spirit and character peculiar to the American innovator-entrepreneur.

Coe, Lewis. The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1993. Coe, a former Morse telegrapher, traces the genesis of the telegraph from 1832. Recounts the creation of the first transcontinental telegraph line and analyzes the telegraph’s impact on the Civil War.

Harlow, Alvin F. Old Wires and New Waves. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936. A comprehensive look at long-distance communication via signal, from Trojan War signal fires to the American telephone.

Larkin, Oliver W. Art and Life in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. Though not as specific as the author’s Samuel Morse and American Democratic Art, published in 1954 in Boston by Little, Brown, this text seems more readily available. Explores Morse’s standing among other artists of the period. Very good on the contrasts between pursuit of the arts in the New World and the Old.

Mabee, Carleton. The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944. The standard Morse biography. Mabee writes a unified account of a man whose varied interests are a delight and challenge to follow.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memorial of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Including Appropriate Ceremonies of Respect at the National Capitol and Elsewhere. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875. One measure of a man’s life is the mourning of his passing. The ceremonies described here were particularly modern, uniting electronically virtually the entire world in a common bond of gratitude and sorrow.

Morse, Samuel F. B. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals. 2 vols. Edited by Edward Lind Morse. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Begins with Morse’s first thoughts of telegraphic communication while aboard the packet ship Sully.

Silverman, Kenneth. Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Meticulously researched biography portraying Morse as a restless, naïve dreamer, who, despite the success of his invention, believed he was a failure.

Vail, Alfred. The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph. Philadelphia: Lee and Blanchard, 1845. Reprint. Eyewitness to Early American Telegraphy. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Explains the workings of the telegraph, illustrated with fully labeled diagrams.