Communicating across the young United States could be a real chore in 1844. Mail — carried mostly by horseback couriers — traveled slowly. It could take weeks to send a letter home from several states away. And sending a reply could take more weeks.
But all that changed, 180 years ago Friday, thanks to a heart-broken painter and art instructor who had a knack for science.
Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, Samuel Morse studied philosophy, mathematics, science and religion at Yale before heading to London to study painting at the Royal Academy. His studies there took place while the War of 1812 was fought back in America.
Morse returned in 1815 and became a full-time portrait painter, accepting commissions from wealthy patrons, organizations and, in some cases, government institutions.
In 1826, he helped found the National Academy of Design in New York and in 1832, became professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York — what is now New York University. This made Morse one of the first art professors in the United States.
Among Morse’s most notable work: Portraits of the nation’s second and fifth presidents, John Adams and James Monroe. The Monroe portrait hangs today in the White House.
In 1825, Morse was working on a portrait in Washington, D.C., when he received a letter from his father notifying him that his wife, back in Connecticut, had fallen gravely ill shortly after giving birth to their third child.
Morse raced back home to find that not only had his wife died, but she was already buried. He was struck by grief that it had taken days for him to receive the letter. This launched his thinking about ways to speed up communications.
While returning from a trip to France in 1832, Morse struck up a conversation with Charles Thomas Jackson, an American scientist who was performing experiments with electromagnetism. Suddenly, Morse’s interest in science came flooding back to him. He became inspired to find ways to use electricity to transmit messages over long distances.
Morse wasn’t yet aware that two English scientists, Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke, were also conducting similar experiments. In 1837, they would receive a British patent for a machine that used multiple wires to transmit a single message.
The method Morse would develop with the help of a colleague at the University of the City of New York — chemistry instructor Leonard D. Gale — would use a single wire and would use extra circuits, or relays, to boost the strength of signals so they could be transmitted over longer distances.
In January 1838, Morse and a new financial backer and fellow scientist, Alfred Vail, successfully demonstrated their electric telegraph machine for the public in Morristown, New Jersey. In order to send messages, Morse had developed a system of short and long signals — they’d later be called dots and dashes — that he coded into numbers and letters of the alphabet.
Later that year, Morse approached Congress for money to build the nation’s first telegraph line, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. By that time, however, the economic turmoil of what came to be called the Panic of 1837 had taken hold. Federal support for Morse’s line was put on hold.
In the meantime, Morse traveled back to Europe seeking more financial backers and a patent for his invention. Learning of an earlier patent there, he called on Wheatstone and was relieved to find his system was simpler and more efficient to use than the one Wheatstone and Cooke had developed.
It wasn’t until 1843 that the U.S. economy had recovered sufficiently for Congress to consider Morse’s proposal. The House of Representatives passed a bill granting Morse $30,000, and the Senate approved it in the final hours of that year’s final session.
carry a wire 40 miles between Washington and Baltimore, but one of Morse’s partners — a congressman, in fact — had purchased low-cost wire that turned out to have defective insulation. The underground telegraph wire was useless.
With a deadline approaching, his construction engineer proposed stringing wires overhead from trees and poles. A desperate Morse gave his approval.
On May 24, 1844, Morse called together a group of congressmen to a table set up near what was, at the time, the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol to witness the first telegraph message sent: “What hath God wrought.”
An illustration of Morse sending the first signal. The paper copy of his first message from then has since been kept preserved in the Library of Congress.
Moments later, Vail sent the same message back from Baltimore. The era of instant long-distance communication had begun.
This edition of Further Review was adapted for the web by Zak Curley.
