Samuel Morse

Morse trained as a painter, not an engineer. Yale gave him a taste for the science lectures of Benjamin Silliman, but it was London and the Royal Academy that made him an artist, and for two decades he tried to be a great one. He painted John Adams and James Monroe, founded the National Academy of Design and served as its first president, and in 1826 took a professorship in painting and sculpture in New York, the first of its kind in the country. His most ambitious canvas, a six-by-nine-foot gallery of copied Old Masters called Gallery of the Louvre, found almost no buyers when he showed it in New York in 1833. He was over 40 and broke.

The telegraph began with a shipboard conversation in 1832, when Morse fell in talking with a fellow passenger, Charles Thomas Jackson, about electromagnetism, and started sketching a single-wire signaling system on the spot. He was undertrained for the engineering — chemist Leonard Gale supplied the relay that let a signal travel past a few hundred feet, and Alfred Vail, a young partner with money and mechanical skill, helped build the equipment and shape the code carrying Morse's name. Congress funded a 38-mile test line from Washington to Baltimore in 1843, and on May 24, 1844, Morse tapped out 'What hath God wrought' from the Supreme Court chamber. He spent much of the rest of his life in court defending the patent, and his final decade collecting European honors for an invention Washington was still slow to credit.

He got rich in the end — his estate was worth roughly half a million dollars in 1872, built on royalties that came slowly, after years of suits against rival builders. He spent some of it becoming one of the loudest anti-Catholic voices in America. Writing pseudonymously as 'Brutus,' he published Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States in 1835, arguing Catholic immigration was engineered from Austria and Rome to subvert American liberty, and ran for New York mayor in 1836 on the nativist ticket, losing badly. In the 1850s he turned the same certainty on slavery, publishing a treatise calling it 'a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.' The man who wired the country together spent decades arguing parts of it did not belong.

European governments recognized him before Washington did — France, Austria, Russia, and six others together paid him 400,000 francs in 1858 for telegraph instruments already running on their lines. New York unveiled a bronze statue of him in Central Park the year before he died, and in 1896 his face went onto the two-dollar silver certificate alongside Robert Fulton's. His painting is a footnote now — the Louvre gallery canvas that failed to sell in 1833 hangs today in a Chicago museum, better regarded than it was in his lifetime. His name survives mainly as a code, still taught, still used by amateur radio operators long after the wires came down.

Samuel Morse's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Gallery of the Louvre artwork
  Miniature copies of 38 Old Masters on one canvas — his last major painting 1833
• National Academy of Design company
  Co-founded and served as its first president 1826
• Electric telegraph invention
  Built with Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail 1837
• Morse code invention
  Developed with Alfred Vail for the telegraph 1838
• Washington-Baltimore telegraph line invention
  Congress-funded 38-mile demonstration line 1844
• Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States book
  Anti-Catholic tract published under the pseudonym Brutus 1835

• 1810 aged ~19 Graduates from Yale College
• February 7, 1825 aged 33 His wife Lucretia dies of a heart attack after childbirth
• 1832 aged ~41 Sketches a single-wire telegraph on a ship home from Europe Conceived after a conversation with fellow passenger Charles Thomas Jackson about electromagnetism.
• 1836 aged ~45 Loses the New York mayoral race on the nativist ticket
• January 11, 1838 aged 46 Gives the first public telegraph demonstration in Morristown, New Jersey
• May 24, 1844 aged 53 Sends 'What hath God wrought' from Washington to Baltimore
• 1853 aged ~62 The Supreme Court upholds his core telegraph patent in O'Reilly v. Morse
• June 10, 1871 aged 80 A bronze statue of him is unveiled in Central Park
• April 2, 1872 aged 80 Dies in New York City

• John Adams 1735–1826
  Second President and key Founding Father who helped secure independence and shaped early American diplomacy. painted his portrait
• James Monroe 1758–1831
  Fifth president associated with the Monroe Doctrine and an era of territorial expansion and one-party dominance. painted his portrait
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. succeeded him in telecommunications
• Robert Fulton 1765–1815
  Engineer and inventor whose steamboat Clermont revolutionized American river transportation. shared a banknote with