Samuel F. B. Morse

Samuel F. B. Morse
250px 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.

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 in portrait painting 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.

Later years

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 electrical 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 electrical 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 electrical 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, D.C. 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, D.C. 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, D.C. 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 Baltimore) 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, New York and the Mississippi.⁴

Morse also at one time adopted Charles Wheatstone and Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting an electrical 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.

The Morse telegraphic apparatus was officially adopted as the standard for European telegraphy in 1851. Great Britain (with its British Empire) remained the only notable part of the world where other forms of electrical telegraph were in widespread use (they continued to use the needle telegraphs invented by William Fothergill Cooke and Professor Charles Wheatstone).⁵(see Submarine communications cable).

In the United States Morse 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.⁵ Nevertheless, in spite of this clear ruling, Morse still received no official recongnition from the United States government.

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

Assisted by the American Ambassador in Paris the governments of Europe were approached regarding how they had long neglected Morse whilst 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.".⁶

There was still no such recognition in the USA. This remained the case until June 10, 1871, when a bronze statue of Samuel Morse was unveiled in Central Park, New York City.

View on slavery

In the 1850s, 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.

Morse's view on the topic of slavery is unfortunate, and there was a multitude others in the 1850s who made statements which many of them later regretted.

In spite of this statement, Samuel Morse 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'.⁷ Morse was not a selfish man. Other people and corporations (particularly in the North America) made millions using his inventions, yet most rarely paid him for the use of his patented telegraph. He was not bitter about this, though he would have appreciated more rewards for his labours. Morse was comfortable, by the time of his death his estate was valued at c. $500,000.⁷

Bidding farewell

On 10th June 1871 at 9 p.m. "all the telegraph wires of America were connected to a single Morse key, on which Morse himself bade farewell to the community he had created. 'Greetings and thanks to the telegraph fraternity throughout the world. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace. Good will to men,' ran the message, transmitted by a skilled operator, after which Morse himself sat down at the operating table to tremendous cheers, which were silenced by a gesture from Orton. In total silence, Morse then tapped out his signature, 'S.F.B. Morse', and the entire audience rose to its feet in a standing ovation.".⁸

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.

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.

References

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• 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.

External links

• Reinhardt, Joachim, "Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) Congo, 1988." Physics-Related Stamps. March 27, 2004.

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