Samuel F. B. Morse was not supposed to be an inventor. Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, he was the son of a prominent geographer. He went to Yale. Then he crossed the ocean to study painting in England from 1811 to 1815. When he came back, he worked as a traveling portraitist. His paintings are still considered some of the best of the era.
He was also the first president of the National Academy of Design, a post he held from 1826 to 1845. But art was only half his story.
Somewhere between sketching faces and organizing the art world, Morse started thinking about electricity. He worked on an electric telegraph independently of similar experiments in Europe between 1832 and 1835. He genuinely believed his version was the first of its kind. By 1838, he had created a system of dots and dashes. It became known internationally as Morse code.
The path to a global network was not smooth. Congress refused to fund a transatlantic telegraph line. They said no. But they did say yes to a domestic link.
Federal support came for a line running from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. When it was finished in 1844, Morse sent the first message. It was a biblical quote: “What hath God wrought!”
The patents that followed made him famous. They also made him wealthy. He left New York in 1872, leaving behind a world that suddenly shrank because of his dots and dashes.
