Samuel F. B. Morse Biography
Born: April 27, 1791
Charlestown, Massachusetts
Died: April 2, 1872
New York, New York
American inventor and artist
Samuel F. B. Morse, American artist and inventor, designed and developed the first successful
electromagnetic (magnetism caused by electricity) telegraph system.
Early life
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1791. He was the first
son of Jedidiah Morse, a clergyman, and Elizabeth Breese, of New Jersey. "Finley," as his parents called
him, was the son quickest to change moods while his other two brothers, Sidney and Richard, were less
temperamental. His brothers helped him out many times in his adult years. The Morses’ commitment to
education had Samuel in Phillips Academy by the age of seven. Though not a star student, his drawing
skills were good. Both his teachers' and his parents' encouragement led to Samuel's success with
miniature portraits on ivory. Samuel graduated from Yale College in 1810. He wished to pursue a career
in art, but his father was opposed to this. Samuel took a job as a clerk in a Charlestown bookstore.
During this time he continued to paint. His father reversed his decision and in 1811 allowed Morse to
travel to England to pursue art. During this time, Morse worked at the Royal Academy with the
respected American artist Benjamin West (1738–1820).
Artist at work
In 1815 Morse returned to America and set up a studio in Boston, Massachusetts. He soon discovered
that his large canvases attracted attention but not sales. In those days Americans looked to painters
primarily for portraits, and Morse found that even these sales were difficult to get. He traveled
extensively in search of work, finally settling in New York City in 1823. Perhaps his two best-known
canvases are his portraits of the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834; a French general who served with
George Washington [1732–1799] during the American Revolution), which he painted in Washington,
D.C., in 1825.
In 1826 Morse helped found, and became the first president of, the National Academy of Design, an
organization that was intended to help secure sales for artists and to raise the taste of the public. The
previous year Morse's wife had died; in 1826 his father died. The death of his mother in 1828 dealt
another severe blow, and the following year Morse left for Europe to recover.
Electromagnetism
In October 1832 Morse returned to the United States. On the voyage he met Charles Thomas Jackson,
an eccentric doctor and inventor, with whom he discussed electromagnetism. Jackson assured Morse
that an electric impulse could be carried along even a very long wire. Morse later recalled that he
reacted to this news with the thought that "if this be so, and the presence of electricity can be made
visible in any desired part of the circuit,
Samuel F. B. Morse.
Courtesy of the
Library of Congress
.
I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any
distance." He immediately made some sketches of a device to accomplish this purpose.
Even as an art professor at the University of the City of New York, the telegraph was never far from
Morse's mind. He had long been interested in gadgetry and had even taken out a patent (document
protecting the owner of an invention from having it stolen). He had also attended public lectures on
electricity. His shipboard sketches of 1832 had clearly laid out the three major parts of the telegraph: a
sender, which opened and closed an electric circuit; a receiver, which used an electromagnet to record
the signal; and a code, which translated the signal into letters and numbers. By January 1836 he had a
working model of the device that he showed to a friend, who advised him of recent developments in the
field of electromagnetism—especially the work of the American physicist (scientist of matter and
energy) Joseph Henry (1797–1878). As a result, Morse was able to greatly improve the efficiency of his
device.
Invention trial
In September 1837 Morse formed a partnership with Alfred Vail, who contributed both money and
mechanical skill. They applied for a patent. The American patent remained in doubt until 1843, when
Congress approved thirty thousand dollars to finance the building of an experimental telegraph line
between the national capital and Baltimore, Maryland. It was over this line, on May 24, 1844, that
Morse tapped out his famous message, "What hath God wrought [made]!"
Morse was willing to sell all of his rights to the invention to the federal government for one hundred
thousand dollars, but a combination of a lack of congressional interest and the presence of private greed
frustrated the plan. Instead he turned his business affairs over to Amos Kendall. Morse then settled
down to a life of wealth and fame. He was generous in his charitable gifts and was one of the founders
of Vassar College in 1861. His last years were spoiled; however, by questions as to how much he had
been helped by others, especially Joseph Henry.
Morse died in New York City on April 2, 1872.
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Morse Code
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of several improvements to the
telegraph, was born in Charlestown, Mass. on April 27, 1791. As a
student at Yale College, Morse became interested in both painting and
in the developing subject of electricity. After his graduation in 1810, he
first concentrated on painting, which he studied in England. He would
later become a well-known portrait artist.
After moving to New York in 1825, he became a founder and the first
president of the National Academy of Design. He also ran for office, but
was defeated in both his campaigns to become New York mayor.
Meanwhile, Morse maintained a steady interest in invention, taking
out three patents for pumps in 1817 with his brother Sidney Edwards
Morse. It wasn't until 1832 that he first became interested in
telegraphy.
That year, Morse was traveling to the United States from Europe on a ship, when he overheard a
conversation about electromagnetism that inspired his idea for an electric telegraph. Though he had
little training in electricity, he realized that pulses of electrical current could convey information over
wires. The telegraph, a device first proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774, was an impractical machine
up until that point, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. Around that time
two German engineers had invented a five-wire model, but Morse wanted to be the first to reduce the
number of wires to one.
Between 1832 and 1837 he developed a working model of an electric telegraph, using crude materials
such as a home-made battery and old clock-work gears. He also acquired two partners to help him
develop his telegraph: Leonard Gale, a professor of science at New York University, and Alfred Vail, who
made available his mechanical skills and his family's New Jersey iron works to help construct better
telegraph models.
Morse's first telegraph device, unveiled in 1837, did use a one-wire system, which produced an EKG-like
line on tickertape. The dips in the line had to be de-coded into letters and numbers using a dictionary
composed by Morse, this assuming that the pen or pencil wrote clearly, which did not always happen.
By the following year he had developed an improved system, having created a dot-and-dash code that
used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits. (His assistant
Vail has been credited by Franklin T. Pope--later a partner of Thomas Edison--with inventing this "dots
and dashes" version). This coding system was significantly better, as it did not require printing or
decoding, but could be "sound read" by operators. In 1838, at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York,
Morse transmitted ten words per minute using the Morse code that would become standard
throughout the world.
In 1842, Morse convinced Congress to provide $30,000 in support of his plan to "wire" the United
States. Meanwhile, Morse also solicited and received advice from a number of American and European
telegraphy experts, including Joseph Henry of Princeton, who had invented a working telegraph in 1831,
and Louis Breguet of Paris. In 1844, Morse filed for a patent (granted 1849) of the printing telegraph. He
had already proved that his device worked over short distances, and the Federal funds he raised had
allowed him to string a wire from Baltimore to Washington. On May 11, 1844, Morse sent the first intercity message. Soon thereafter, he gave the first public demonstration, in which he sent a message from
the chamber of the Supreme Court to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore. The message itself was
borrowed from the Bible by the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents and said, "What hath God
wrought?" By 1846, private companies, using Morse's patent, had built telegraph lines from Washington
to Boston and Buffalo, and were pushing further. The telegraph spread across the US more quickly than
had the railroads, whose routes the wires often followed. By 1854, there were 23,000 miles of telegraph
wire in operation. Western Union was founded in 1851, and in 1866, the first successful trans-Atlantic
cable link was established. Though Morse didnât invent the telegraph and did not single-handedly create
Morse Code, he may have been telegraphy's greatest promoter, and undoubtedly contributed to its
rapid development and adoption throughout the world.
Morse died of pneumonia in New York on April 2, 1872. Late in his life, he shared his considerable
wealth through grants to colleges such as Yale and Vassar, in addition to charities and artists.
[July 2002]
The Invention of the Telegraph
Earlier Signal Systems
Long before Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message "What hath God wrought?"
from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, there were signaling systems that enabled people to
communicate over distances. Most were visual or "semaphore" systems using flags or lights. In the
eighteenth century, such systems used an observer who would decipher a signal from a high tower on a
distant hill and then send it on to the next station. The young American republic wanted just such a
system along its entire Atlantic coast and offered a prize of $30,000 for a workable proposal. The
framers of this legislation had no way of knowing that when they used the word "telegraph" to refer to
this visual semaphore system, they would be offered an entirely new and revolutionary means of
communication--electricity.
The Growth of an Idea
The idea of using electricity to communicate over distance is said to
have occurred to Morse during a conversation aboard ship when he
was returning from Europe in 1832. Michael Faraday's recently
invented electromagnet was much discussed by the ship's
passengers, and when Morse came to understand how it worked,
he speculated that it might be possible to send a coded message
over a wire. While a student at Yale College years before, he had
written his parents a letter about how interesting he found the
lectures on electricity. Despite what he had learned at Yale, Morse
found when he began to develop his idea that he had little real
understanding of the nature of electricity, and after sporadic
attempts to work with batteries, magnets, and wires, he finally
turned for help to a colleague at the University of the City of New
York, Leonard D. Gale.
The laying of the cable---John and
Jonathan joining hands
Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ625309
Gale was a professor of chemistry and familiar with the electrical work of Princeton's Joseph Henry, a
true pioneer in the new field. Well before Morse had his shipboard idea about a telegraph, Henry rang a
bell at a distance by opening and closing an electric circuit. In 1831, he had published an article, of which
Morse was unaware, that contained details suggesting the idea of an electric telegraph. Gale's help and
his knowledge of this article proved crucial to Morse's telegraph system because Gale not only pointed
out flaws in the system but showed Morse how he could regularly boost the strength of a signal and
overcome the distance problems he had encountered by using a relay system Henry had invented.
Henry's experiments, Gale's assistance, and, soon after, hiring the young technician Alfred Vail were
keys to Morse's success.
Obstacles and Opportunities
By December 1837, Morse had enough confidence in his new system to apply for the federal
government's appropriation, and during the next year he conducted demonstrations of his telegraph
both in New York and Washington.
[Letter from Samuel F.B. Morse
to his brother, Sidney Edwards
Morse, announcing the passing of
the appropriation bill, 23
February 1843] Bound volume--20 June 1842-12 September 1843
However, when the economic disaster known as the Panic of 1837
took hold of the nation and caused a long depression, Morse was
forced to wait for better times. It was during this period that
Morse visited Europe again and tried not only to secure patent
protection overseas but to examine competing telegraph systems
in England. After meeting Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of one
such electric telegraph system, Morse realized that although his
main competitor had built an ingenious mechanism, his own
system was far simpler, more efficient, and easier to use.
Morse felt very confident. His system used an automatic sender
consisting of a plate with long and short metal bars representing
the Morse code equivalent of the alphabet and numbers. The
operator slid a pointer connected to a battery and the sending wire across the bars, and immediately
the appropriate dots and dashes were sent over the line. The receiver used an electromagnet with a
stylus (a pen-like instrument) on the end of an arm. When the magnet operated, the stylus made an
impression or tiny dent in a paper tape which wound past a clockwork motor. The tape was then read by
the operator.
By 1843, the country was beginning to recover economically, and Morse again asked Congress for the
$30,000 that would allow him to build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, forty miles away.
The House of Representatives eventually passed the bill containing the Morse appropriation, and the
Senate approved it in the final hours of that Congress's last session. With President Tyler's signature,
Morse received the cash he needed and began to carry out plans for an underground telegraph line.
Realizing a Great Invention
Morse had hired the ingenious construction engineer Ezra Cornell
to lay the pipe carrying the wire, and although Cornell did his job
superbly, one of Morse's partners, Congressman F. O. J. Smith, had
purchased wire with defective insulation. Too much time had been
wasted laying bad wire, and with the project on a rigid deadline,
something had to be done quickly. Cornell suggested that the
fastest and cheapest way of connecting Washington and Baltimore
was to string wires overhead on trees and poles. The desperate
Morse gave the go-ahead, and the line was completed in time for
the dramatic and spectacularly successful link between the
Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol building and the railroad
station in Baltimore.
[Drawing of telegraph poles, 25
June 1844] Bound volume---10
June-21 October 1844
Soon, as overhead wires connected cities up and down the Atlantic coast, the dots-and-dashes method
that recorded messages on a long moving strip of paper was replaced by the operator's ability to
interpret the code in real time (once the receiver was given two different types of "stop" pin that each
made a different sound) and transcribe it into English letters as he heard it. Telegraph lines soon
extended westward, and within Morse's own lifetime they connected the continents of Europe and
America.
Leonard C. Bruno, Manuscript Division
The History of the Electric Telegraph and Telegraphy
The Beginning of Electronic Communications
By Mary Bellis, About.com Guide
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The electric telegraph is a now outdated communication system that transmitted electric signals over
wires from location to location that translated into a message.
The non-electric telegraph was invented by Claude Chappe in 1794. This system was visual and used
semaphore, a flag-based alphabet, and depended on a line of sight for communication. The optical
telegraph was replaced by the electric telegraph, the focus of this article.
In 1809, a crude telegraph was invented in Bavaria by Samuel Soemmering. He used 35 wires with gold
electrodes in water and at the receiving end 2000 feet the message was read by the amount of gas
caused by electrolysis. In 1828, the first telegraph in the USA. was invented by Harrison Dyar who sent
electrical sparks through chemically treated paper tape to burn dots and dashes.
Electromagnet
In 1825, British inventor William Sturgeon (1783-1850) revealed an invention that laid the foundations
for a large scale evolution in electronic communications: the electromagnet. Sturgeon displayed the
power of the electromagnet by lifting nine pounds with a seven-ounce piece of iron wrapped with wires
through which the current of a single cell battery was sent. However, the true power of the
electromagnet was its role in the creation of countless inventions to come.
Three Telegraph Systems Emerge Based on the Electromagnet
In 1830, an American, Joseph Henry (1797-1878), demonstrated the potential of William Sturgeon's
electromagnet for long distance communication by sending an electronic current over one mile of wire
to activate an electromagnet which caused a bell to strike.
In 1837, British physicists, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the Cooke and Wheatstone
telegraph using the same principle of electromagnetism.
However, it was Samuel Morse (1791-1872) that successfully exploited the electromagnet and bettered
Joseph Henry's invention. Morse made sketches of a "magnetized magnet" based on Henry's work.
Morse invented a telegraph system that was a practical and commercial success.
Samuel Morse
While a professor of arts and design at New York University in 1835, Samuel Morse proved that signals
could be transmitted by wire. He used pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a
marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper - the invention of Morse Code. The following year,
the device was modified to emboss the paper with dots and dashes. He gave a public demonstration in
1838, but it was not until five years later that Congress (reflecting public apathy) funded $30,000 to
construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles.
Six years later, members of Congress witnessed the sending and receiving of messages over part of the
telegraph line. Before the line had reached Baltimore, the Whig party held its national convention there,
and on May 1, 1844, nominated Henry Clay. This news was hand-carried to Annapolis Junction (between
Washington and Baltimore) where Morse's partner, Alfred Vail, wired it to the Capitol. This was the first
news dispatched by electric telegraph.
What Hath God Wrought?
The message, "What hath God wrought?" sent later by "Morse Code" from the old Supreme Court
chamber in the United States Capitol to his partner in Baltimore, officially opened the completed line of
May 24, 1844. Morse allowed Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend, to choose the words of
the message, and she selected a verse from Numbers XXIII, 23: "What hath God wrought?", which was
recorded onto paper tape. Morse's early system produced a paper copy with raised dots and dashes,
which were translated later by an operator.
The Telegraph Spreads
Samuel Morse and his associates obtained private funds to extend their line to Philadelphia and New
York. Small telegraph companies, meanwhile began functioning in the East, South, and Midwest.
Dispatching trains by telegraph started in 1851, the same year Western Union began business. Western
Union built its first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, mainly along railroad rights-of-way.
In 1881, the Postal Telegraph System entered the field for economic reasons, and merged with Western
Union in 1943.
The original Morse telegraph printed code on tape. However, in the United States the operation
developed into sending by key and receiving by ear. A trained Morse operator could transmit 40 to 50
words per minute. Automatic transmission, introduced in 1914, handled more than twice that number.
Canadian, Fredick Creed invented a way to convert Morse code to text in 1900 called the Creed
Telegraph System.
Multiplex Telegraph, Teleprinters, & Other Advancements
In 1913 Western Union developed multiplexing, which it made possible to transmit eight messages
simultaneously over a single wire (four in each direction). Teleprinter machines came into use about
1925. Varioplex, introduced in 1936, enabled a single wire to carry 72 transmissions at the same time
(36 in each direction). Two years later Western Union introduced the first of its automatic facsimile
devices. In 1959 Western Union inaugurated TELEX, which enables subscribers to the teleprinter service
to dial each other directly.
Telephone Rivals the Telegraph
Until 1877, all rapid long-distance communication depended upon the telegraph. That year, a rival
technology developed that would again change the face of communication -- the telephone. By 1879,
patent litigation between Western Union and the infant telephone system was ended in an agreement
that largely separated the two services.
Samuel Morse is best known as the inventor of the telegraph, but he is also esteemed for his
contributions to American portraiture. His painting is characterized by delicate technique and vigorous
honesty and insight into the character of his subjects.
Samuel Morse & The Telegraph
Samuel Morse & The TelegraphSamuel Morse - Telegraph PatentTimeline: Biography of Samuel
Elsewhere on the Web
Samuel MorseThe Story of the TelegraphTelegraph Timeline
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Morse Code (-- --- •-• ••• • -•-• --- -•• •)
Origin
Morse Code was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), a painter and founder of the
National Academy of Design. He conceived the basic idea of an electromagnetic telegraph in
1832, and produced the first working telegraph set in 1836. This made transmission possible
over any distance. The first Morse Code message, "What hath God wrought?", was sent from
Washington to Baltimore.
Today experienced operators copy received text without the need to write as they receive, and
when transmitting, can easily converse at 20 to 30 words per minute. Morse Code will always
remain a viable means of providing highly reliable communications during difficult
communications conditions.
Morse Code can be transmitted using sound or light, as sometimes happens between ships at
sea. It is used in emergencies to transmit distress signals when no other form of communication
is available. The standard international distress signal is •••---••• (SOS)
Since December 2003, Morse Code has included the @ symbol: it is a combination of a and c: •-•-• and is the first change to the system since before World War II.
Sources: www.arrl.org/FandES/ead/learncw/
www.cjonline.com/stories/021704/pag_morsecode.shtml
Links
Information about Morse Code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
http://www.voicenation.com/resources/general-resources/articlelibrary/morse-code-resources.shtml
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Online Morse Code lessons and guides
http://www.cq2k.com
http://www.learnmorsecode.info
Morse Code and Phonetic Alphabets
http://www.scphillips.com/morse/
Morse Codes (Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese & Korean,
etc.)
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/morse.html
Morse Code Music
http://www.philtulga.com/morse.html
Superaldis - an aldis lamp and heliograph simulator
http://home.no.net/fenja256/superaldis/
Other communication/notation systems
Braille, Maritime Signal Flags, Moon, Morse code, Semaphore
http://www.whoswho.de/templ/te_bio.php?PID=2465&RID=1
http://www.telegraph-history.org/edison/appletons/index.html