Samuel F. B. Morse

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Samuel F. B. Morse

Samuel Morse
Born: April 27, 1791
Charlestown, Massachusetts
Died: April 2, 1872
5 West 22nd Street, New York City, New York
Occupation: painter and inventor

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American, a painter of portraits and historic scenes, and co-inventor (with Alfred Vail) of the Morse Code.

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[edit] Early years

Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the first child of geographer and pastor Jedidiah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Breese Morse. After attending Phillips Academy, Andover, he went on to Yale. He devoted himself to art and became a pupil of Washington Allston, a well known American painter. While at Yale College, he attended lectures on electricity from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. He earned money by painting portraits. In 1810, he graduated from Yale University. Morse later accompanied Allston to Europe in 1811.

In 1825 his career as a portrait painter appeared to be taking off when he was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette (a military hero). Morse was in Europe for three years improving his painting skills, 1830-32, travelling in Italy, Switzerland and France. The project he eventually selected was to paint miniature copies of some 38 of the Louvre's famous paintings on a single canvas (6 ft. x 9 ft.) which he entitled "The Gallery of the Louvre". He planned to complete "The Gallery of the Louvre" when he returned home to Massachusetts and to earn an income by exhibiting his work and charging admission. This was typical of Morse who stumbled haphazardly from one money-making scheme to another in those days. On the sea voyage home in 1832 Morse encountered Dr. Charles Jackson of Boston who was well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson's electromagnet. In the course of the six-week voyage Morse became hooked on the concept of a telegraph, and "The Gallery of the Louvre" was soon forgotten. He was already devising his code even before the ship docked.1

Morse in his youth.
Morse in his youth.

[edit] Later years

Portrait of Samuel F. B. Morse by Mathew Brady, between 1855 and 1865
Portrait of Samuel F. B. Morse by Mathew Brady, between 1855 and 1865

Morse married first, Lucretia Pickering Walker on 29 September, 1819, in Concord, NH. She died on 7th February 1825, shortly after the birth of their fourth child. He married second, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold on 10 August 1848 in Utica, NY.

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone reached the stage of launching a commercial telegraph prior to Morse. They started later. In England Cooke became fascinated by telegraph in 1836, four years later than Morse, but with greater financial resources (and tons of ingenuity) Cooke abandoned his primary subject of anatomy and built a small telegraph within three weeks. Professor Charles Wheatstone also was experimenting with telegraphy and (most importantly) understood that a single large battery would not carry a telegraphic signal over long distances, and that numerous small batteries were far more successful and efficient in this task (Wheatstone was building on the primary research of Joseph Henry, an American physicist). Cooke and Wheatstone formed a partnership and patented the telegraph in May 1837, and within a short time had provided the Great Western Railway with a 13-mile stretch of telegraph. However, Cooke and Wheatstone's multiple wire telegraph signalling method would be overtaken by Morse's superior code within a few years.

Samuel Morse also encountered the problem of getting a telegraphic signal to carry over more than a few hundred yards of wire. His breakthrough came from the insights of Professor Leonard Gale, who taught chemistry at New York University (a personal friend of Joseph Henry). With Gale's help Morse soon was able to send a message through ten miles of wire. This was the great breakthrough Morse had been seeking!2

Morse and Gale were soon joined by a young enthusiastic man, Alfred Vail, who had excellent skills, insights and money. Morse's telegraph now began to be developed very rapidly.

In 1838 a trip to Washington failed to attract federal sponsorship for a telegraph line. Morse then travelled to Europe seeking both sponsorship and patents, but in London discovered that, due to Cooke and Wheatstone's already established patent, no patent was available for his work.

Without funding Morse's telegraph remained a dream. The situation looked bleak indeed. Morse made one last desperate trip to Washington in December 1842, stringing "wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol, and sent messages back and forth -- and, for some reason, this time some people believed him, and a bill was finally proposed allocating $30,000 towards building an experimental line".3

The general public was highly skeptical, and there were also a great many skeptics in Congress. A forty-mile line was constructed between Washington and Baltimore. The most convincing demonstration was when the results of the Whig National Convention at Baltimore in the spring of 1844 reached Washington via telegraph prior to the arrival of the first train. On 24 May 1844 the line (which ran along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad between the Capitol and Balimore) was officially opened as Morse sent his famous words "What hath God wrought" along the wire.

In May 1845 the Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed in order to radiate telegraph lines from New York City towards Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo and the Mississippi.4

Morse also at one time adopted Charles Wheatstone and Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting a telegraph signal through a body of water or down steel railroad tracks or anything conductive. He went to great lengths to win a law suit that he might be called "inventor of the telegraph", and promoted himself as being an inventor, but Alfred Vail played an important role in the invention of the Morse Code, which was based on earlier codes for the electromagnetic telegraph.

In 1839, Samuel Morse published (from Paris) the first American description of daguerreotype photography by Louis Daguerre.

In the 1850s, Morse went to Copenhagen and visited the Thorvaldsens Museum[1], where the sculptor's grave is in the inner courtyard. He was received by King Frederick VII, who decorated him with the Order of the Dannebrog. Morse expressed his wish to donate his portrait from 1830 to the king. The Thorvaldsen portrait today belongs to Margaret II of Denmark.

In the 1860s, Morse became well-known as an active defender of America's institution of slavery, considering it to be divinely sanctioned. In his treatise "An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery," he wrote:

My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom. The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler.[1]

He died on 2 April 1872 at his home at 5 West 22nd Street, New York, New York, at the age of eighty, and was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

[edit] Trivia

  • Morse invented a marble-cutting machine that could carve three dimensional sculptures in marble or stone. Morse couldn't patent it, however, because of an existing 1820 Thomas Blanchard design.
  • New York University's core curriculum and list of requirements is known as the Morse Academic Plan (MAP).
  • A letter to a friend describing the challenge of defending his patent on the electromagnetic telegraph, although he had no part in its invention since his friend Alfred Vail imported this invention by Gauß from Europe, and Morse is even suspected to have received the Morse Code from Vail.[2] (1848).[3]
I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would you have believed it ten years ago that a question could be raised on that subject?
  • There is a blue plaque commemorating him at 141 Cleveland Street, London, where he lived 1812-15.

[edit] External articles and references

Statue of Samuel F. B. Morse by Byron M. Picket, New York's Central Park, dedicated 1871
Statue of Samuel F. B. Morse by Byron M. Picket, New York's Central Park, dedicated 1871
Notes

1 The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (Weidenfeld & Nicholson:London) 1998, pp. 26-29.

2 The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, p. 40.

3 The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, p. 47.

4The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, p. 54.

  1. ^ From An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the social system, and its relation to the politics of the day (New York, Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, no. 12, 1863) in Slavery Pamphlets # 60, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Quoted in "Yale, Slavery, & Abolition," an online report on Yale honorees, at http://www.yaleslavery.org/WhoYaleHonors/morse.html.
General
Court Cases
Stamps


[edit] Further reading

  • Paul J. Staiti, Samuel E. B. Morse (Cambridge 1989).
  • Lauretta Dimmick, "Mythic Proportion: Bertel Thorvaldsen's Influence in America", Thorvaldsen: l'ambiente, l'influsso, il mito, ed. P. Kragelund and M. Nykjær, Rome 1991 (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, Supplementum 18.), pp. 169-191.
  • Tom Standage, "The Victorian Internet", pp. 21-40.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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