Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Samuel Morse

Samuel Morse

Lived 1791 – 1872.

Samuel Morse was a polymath who studied mathematics and science at college supporting himself selling the works of art he painted. He became a renowned artist and took part in the invention of the telegraph.

Beginnings

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27, 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA. His father was Jedidiah Morse, a geographer, author, and Calvinist pastor who moved in prominent circles and was a friend of George Washington. His mother was Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese.

His parents had eleven children, only three of whom survived infancy. Their eldest child is the subject of this article and, although he is now generally known as Samuel Morse, they knew him by his second name, Finlay.

Advertisements
The house Samuel Morse was born in.

The house Samuel Morse was born in.

Samuel Morse received his schooling as a boarder at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from where, age 14, he proceeded to Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in October 1805.

From early childhood he had drawn pictures for pleasure. Now he blossomed as an artist, helping fund his education by selling paintings. He did not charge his friends for portraits he painted of them.

As a student in London, Morse painted The Judgment of Jupiter. It now hangs in Yale University’s Art Gallery.

At Yale he studied a broad curriculum including Chemistry, Natural Philosophy (Physics), French, Greek, Geometry, and Geography. His fellow students gave him the nickname “Geography.” He wrote at the time about how he found the subject of electricity particularly interesting.

In 1810, age 19, he graduated from Yale with Phi Beta Kappa honors from the most prestigious of America’s honor societies.

In 1811, Morse entered the Royal Academy of Arts in the United Kingdom’s capital city, London. He studied Renaissance art and created his own works of art. He returned to America in 1815 and became a highly successful artist, painting prominent citizens such as the former US President & Founding Father John Adams.

In 1826, age 35, he helped found New York City’s National Academy of Design, serving as its president from 1826 – 1845 and 1861 – 1862.

Advertisements

The Telegraph

Spurred by Tragedy

In 1825, Samuel Morse was in Washington, D.C. painting a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette when a horse messenger delivered a letter telling him his wife had died – Morse immediately returned to his home in New Haven to find she had already been buried. This experience left him with a determination to speed up long distance communication.

Joseph Henry Transmits a Signal

In 1830, in Albany, New York, Joseph Henry discovered that utilizing high voltages allowed him to transmit electrical current over larger distances than previously possible. In a moment of inspiration, he realized he could combine this discovery with an electromagnet – Henry was also a brilliant early pioneer of electromagnetism – to transmit a signal.

His students at Albany Academy gathered around a bell and saw Henry cause it to ring from 1000 feet (305 meters) away. The electric current traveled along 1000 feet of wire, activated an electromagnet, which attracted a metal pivot, ringing a bell. With more work Henry extended the transmission distance to about a mile. Henry had demonstrated two potentially useful new devices: the telegraph and the doorbell. He did not attempt to patent these – he thought of himself as a pure scientist, not a financially driven inventor.

Morse Independently Devises the Telegraph

In 1832, returning from a trip to Europe, Morse met Charles Thomas Jackson, who demonstrated an electromagnet to him. This was when Morse, ever mindful of arriving back in New Haven to find his wife already buried, first had the idea for a telegraph.

Joseph Henry Invents the Relay

The telegraph Joseph Henry demonstrated at Albany could not work over the long distances required for a fully practical telegraph, but Henry overcame this problem.

The key to longer distance transmission was a device called a relay. A relay is a switch that is opened or closed by an electromagnet. In a telegraph line, a relay takes a signal arriving from one circuit and re-transmits it to another circuit; in this way a long telegraph line can be made up of much shorter, individually powered lines, each linked by a relay.

Henry demonstrated a primitive relay to his students at Albany, but he did not publish any details. Professor Leonard Gale, a chemistry teacher at Albany, passed news of Henry’s relay to Samuel Morse.

Samuel Morse Invents the Telegraph

In 1838, with the help of Gale and Alfred Vail, Morse devised and introduced more sophisticated relays at frequent intervals in a wire line and sent a message ten miles (16 km). For several years, Morse was unable to get funding to scale up his system. However, in 1843, Congress finally approved $30,000 to build a 38-mile (61 km) telegraph line along the railroad between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

On May 24, 1844, Morse sent the message, “What hath God wrought,” from Washington to Baltimore. His system could transmit thirty characters a minute. Within six years, the United States had 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of telegraph lines in operation.

Joseph Henry, Leonard Gale, Samuel Morse

Just as the telegraph would convey information from one place to another, Leonard Gale (center) conveyed information about relays from Joseph Henry (left) to Samuel Morse (right).

Morse Code

In order to send messages along the wire, Morse devised a code in which each letter in the alphabet was represented by a particular number of electrical clicks. The codes were sent as electrical pulses of different lengths. The code was improved by Morse’s assistant and financial backer Alfred Vail.

Morse wanted his telegraph system to deliver a permanent message. It did so in the form of permanent indentations – dots and dashes on a paper tape.

international morse code

The International Morse Code, developed from the original code of Morse and Vail.

The Telegraph – Morse’s Invention

Morse was awarded patents for his invention in a number of countries. However, his claim to have invented the telegraph was often ignored, so he did not receive the royalties he ought to have.

In 1854, 10 years after Morse transmitted his famous message from Washington to Baltimore, The United States Supreme Court decided he was entitled to a monopoly. The monopoly applied only to one aspect of his invention: repeater circuitry, in which a relay takes a signal arriving from one battery-powered circuit and re-transmits it to another battery-powered circuit.

The use of individual battery-powered circuits connected by relays allowed a message to be transmitted over large distances with minimal degradation of the signal strength.

With the Supreme Court’s decision, Morse began receiving royalties and became very wealthy.

Morse's telegraph setup

Morse’s telegraph setup.

Personal Details and The End

Morse was a strong supporter of Protestant Christianity and a fierce opponent of Roman Catholicism. He campaigned to restrict the immigration of Catholics into America. He did not oppose slavery.

A wealthy man, he donated large sums to causes he supported, such as the founding of Vasser College for women in 1861: he was a college trustee from 1861-1872. Morse also financially supported Yale College, Protestant churches and Bible societies, and struggling artists.

Morse married Lucretia Pickering Walker on September 29, 1818, in Concord, New Hampshire. They had three children: Susan, Charles, and James. Lucretia died shortly after the birth of James in February 1825. Morse married Sarah Elizabeth Griswold on August 10, 1848. They had four children: Samuel, Cornelia, William, and Edward.

Samuel Morse died, age 80, in New York City on April 2, 1872. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Samuel Morse." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 18 Mar. 2018. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/samuel-morse/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
Samuel I.Prime
Life of Samuel F.B. Morse, LL.D., inventor of the electro-magnetic recording telegraph
D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1875

Samuel Finley Breese Morse and Edward Lind Morse
Samuel F. B. Morse; his letters and journals
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1914

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Joseph Henry
    Joseph Henry
  • John Ambrose Fleming
    John Ambrose Fleming
  • Charles Townes
    Charles Townes
  • Carl Friedrich Gauss
    Carl Friedrich Gauss
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2023