Personal tragedy inspired Samuel Morse to invent the long-distance telegraph

On May 24 1844 Samuel Morse tapped out his first long-distance Morse code message between Baltimore and Washington. His message was: ‘What hath God wrought!’ Taken from Numbers 23:23, Morse’s choice of words to transmit underscored the fact that he was a profoundly religious man.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Jedidiah Morse, a geographer and pastor, and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese. Samuel went to school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Yale where he studied horse anatomy, mathematics, and religious philosophy but also developed an interest in electricity.

While at school he supported himself through his art, and graduated in 1810. The following year, Samuel, accompanied by the artist Washington Allston, left on a three-year trip to England to study painting at Royal Academy (in London). He familiarised himself with the work of Michelangelo and Raphael and painted Dying Hercules, his student masterpiece.

In a letter dated June 13 1813, Morse wrote: ‘My great picture … has not only been received at the Royal Academy, but has one of the finest places in the rooms. It has been spoken of in the papers, which you must know is considered a great compliment.’

A decade later he was based in New York in 1823 and helped found and became first president of the National Academy of Design in the city. By 1832 he was professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York.

Morse was a gifted and prolific painter of portraits, including portraits of John Adams and James Monroe, the second and fifth presidents of the United States respectively, and the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat and soldier who fought on the American side in the War of Independence. He also painted Eli Whitney, the arms manufacturer and inventor of the cotton gin (engine).

However, Morse’s real ambition was to be a historical painter in the mode of John Turnbull (1756-1843), ‘the Painter of the Revolution’ whose most famous canvas depicts the draft Declaration of Independence being presented to Congress. It may be seen in the Rotunda of the US Capitol where it has been since 1826. A smaller version hangs in the Yale University Art Gallery.

This aspect of Morse’s life has been completely overshadowed by his invention of the telegraph and the ‘Morse Code’ (which he devised for use with the telegraph).

In 1825 Lucretia, Samuel’s wife, died (without him even knowing she was ill) and it was this that inspired him to create a method for transferring information quickly over long distances. The result was the invention of the single-wire telegraph.

He drafted his initial ideas for an electric telegraph in 1832, the year he secured his chair at the University of the City of New York, and worked alone for several years on the project.

Congressional interest in establishing a semaphore telegraphy system prompted Morse to suggest that had already had devised a superior system which he demonstrated to Congress in 1837.

He enlisted the support of Alfred Vail, one of his former students whose father owned the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. Vail helped convert Morse’s designs into commercially practical devices. He received additional help from Leonard Gale, a chemist, and Joseph Henry, a physicist.

In 1842 Morse strung wires between two rooms in the Capitol that made it possible to transmit messages from room to room.

Congress granted him $30,000 for an experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore which Morse and Vail completed in 1844. As already noted, the first long distance Morse code (originally called the Morse alphabet) message was sent on May 24 1844.

Although Congress ought to have appreciated that Morse had come up with one of the technological marvels of the age, Congress perversely refused to purchase Morse’s patent or pay for the completion of other lines. Morse and his backers, who included a former US postmaster general, sold their patent rights to various private companies. By 1849 there was an estimated 12,000 miles of telegraph lines run by 20 different companies in the United States. In 1852 a submarine telegraph cable was successfully laid across the English Channel, making telegraph communication between London and Paris possible. The following year a cable was laid between Portpatrick and Donaghadee.

The journalist John O’Sullivan, who is usually credited with coining the phrase ‘Manifest Destiny’ (the belief that the territorial expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific was divinely ordained), predicted that the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the San Francisco Union, the Astoria Evening Post, or the Nookta Morning News to set up in type the first part of the President’s Inaugural before the echoes of the latter half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol, as spoken from his lips.’

The Cambridge historian David Reynolds has noted: ‘In combination, the railroad and the telegraph and railway’ conquered ‘existing perceptions of geographical limitation’.

Morse’s political and religious views are of some interest. Although Jedidiah Morse was a stern Calvinist, Samuel was attracted to Unitarianism, the very opposite end of the Protestant theological spectrum.

Politically he was a Nativist, viewing Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany with deep foreboding. Quite apart from the perceived threat to their sense of America as ‘a Protestant nation’, many middle-class Americans also viewed such immigrants as ‘riff-raff, teetering on the edge of poverty, alcoholism and crime’.

In the 1850s the Nativist movement enjoyed sweeping success in the state legislatures of most of New England.

Like so many successful Americans of his era, Morse was a great philanthropist. He was extremely interested in the relationship between science and religion and funded a lectureship on ‘the relation of the Bible to the Sciences’.

Samuel Morse died on April 2 1872, at the age of 80, from pneumonia.

Morse’s Ulster-Scots ancestors hailed from Mullabrack, Co Armagh.