Samuel Finley Breese Morse.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27, 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA.

His father Rev. Jedidiah Morse was a geographer and pastor, his mother was Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese Morse.

Samuel received an education within a Federalist framework alongside the instillation of Calvinist virtues, morals and prayers. After attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Samuel went on to Yale College, in 1805, to receive instruction in the subjects of religious philosophy, mathematics and science of horses. While at Yale he was an indifferent student, he attended lectures on electricity from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day and they aroused his interest. He earned money by painting and graduated from Yale in 1810.

After college, to the discomfort of his austere parents, Samuel directed his enthusiasm especially to painting, which he studied in England from 1811 to 1815, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1813. After settling in New York City in 1825, he became one of the most respected painters of his time, rendering character boldly. A natural leader, he was a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design, but was defeated in his campaigns to become mayor of New York or a Congressman. He was quite an accomplished painter as can be seen by his portrait of Mrs. Daniel de Saussure Bacot, (right) painted around 1830.

In 1832, while returning on the ship Sully from another period of art study in Europe, Morse heard a conversation about the newly discovered electromagnet and conceived of the idea of an electric telegraph. He mistakenly thought that the idea of such a telegraph was new, thus helping to give him the impetus to push the idea forward. By 1835 he had his first telegraph model working in the New York University building where he taught art. Being poor, Morse used in his model such crude materials as an old artist's canvas stretcher to hold it, a home-made battery and an old clock-work to move the paper on which dots and dashes were to be recorded. In 1837 Morse acquired two partners to help him develop his telegraph. One was Leonard Gale, a quiet professor of science at New York University who advised him, for example, on how to increase voltage by increasing the number of turns around the electromagnet. Another was Alfred Vail, a morose young man who made available both his mechanical skills and his family's New Jersey iron works to help construct better telegraph models, the third being congressman F O J Smith..

With the aid of his new partners, Samuel applied for a patent for his new telegraph in 1837, which he described as including a dot and dash code to represent numbers, a dictionary to turn the numbers into words and a set of sawtooth type for sending signals. Samuel, discouraged with his art career by this time, was giving nearly all his time to the telegraph. By 1838, at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York, Samuel transmitted ten words per minute. He had dispensed with his number-word dictionary, using instead the dot-dash code directly for letters. Though changes in detail were to be made later, the Morse Code that was to become standard throughout the world had essentially come into being. Vail provided funds as well as facilities at the family ironworks, and Smith provided legal expertise. There’s an irony that disagreements with Vail led to litigation; Vail provided funds for the lawyers, too. The telgraph was eventually patented in Morse’s name alone, an event granted by the US Supreme Court in 1854. Samuel’s decision to abandon painting was possibly due in part to his failure in 1836 to secure a commission to paint the Rotunda of the Capitol building, a commission he had expected. He did not entirely lose contact with his art though, being President of the National Academy of Design from 1826 to 1845.

The first message sent by the electric telegraph was "What hath God wrought", from the Supreme Court Room in the Capitol to the railway depot at Baltimore on May 24th 1844. The words were chosen by Annie Ellsworth. In one letter Samuel wrote this phrase with ‘God’ capitalised and underlined twice.

Although most people nowadays would think of Morse code being used for long-distance radiotelegraphy, the land-line telegraph was standard until about 1880 for short-distance metropolitan communication. Over longer distances the telegraph tended to follow the line of the railways because there were no difficulties over rights-of-way. The lines were mostly overhead, since the problems of insulating underground lines proved insuperable for many years - indeed the development of the original line was hampered owing to this problem. The telegraph of course came to be important for the military, being used first at Varna during the Crimean War in 1854. It was widely used in the American Civil War, where rapid deployment techniques for land-lines were developed; the Spanish-American War found the first use of telegraphy for newspaper correspondents (1898). The first military use for radio telegraphy was during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 - 5. Telegraphists were a special elite; perhaps one of the first documented to suffer from repetitive strain injury. ‘Brasspounding’, or telegraphy on a straight (up and down) key gave rise to telegrapher’s ‘glass arm’; it was this that motivated the invention of the ‘side-swiper’ or ‘bug’ key, the most famous maker of which is Vibroplex.

In 1847 Samuel bought Locust Grove, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and built there an Italianate mansion. This is now a Morse museum, and annually hosts the Poughkeepsie Amateur Radio Society for its Morse Day.

In the United States Samuel had now had his patent for many years, but it was being both ignored and contested. In 1853 the case of the patent came before the Supreme Court where, after very lengthy investigation, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Morse had been the first to combine the battery, electromagnetism, the electromagnet and the correct battery configuration into a workable practical telegraph. Nevertheless, in spite of this clear ruling, Samuel still received no official recognition from the United States government. Assisted by the American Ambassador in Paris, the governments of Europe were approached regarding how they had long neglected Samuel while using his invention. There was then a widespread recognition that something must be done, and in 1858 Morse was awarded the sum of 400,000 French francs (equivalent to about $80,000 at the time) by the governments of France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany and Turkey, each of which contributed a share according to the number of Morse instruments in use in each country. There was still no such recognition in the USA. This remained the case until 10 June 1871, when a bronze statue of Samuel Morse was unveiled in Central Park, New York City.

For his 80th birthday in 1871 a statue was unveiled in Central Park on June 10th, with two thousand telegraphists present. Morse was not, but was that evening at the Academy of Music for an emotional acclamation of his work.

Samuel was a generous man who gave large sums to charity. He also became interested in the relationship of science and religion and provided the funds to establish a lectureship on 'the relation of the Bible to the Sciences'. Samuel was not a selfish man, other people and corporations made millions using his inventions, yet most rarely paid him for the use of his patented telegraph. He was not bitter about this, although he would have appreciated more rewards for his labours. Samuel was comfortably off and by the time of his death, his estate was valued at some $500,000.

He died on 2 April 1872 at his home at 5 West 22nd Street, New York City, at the age of 80. He was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.