Samuel Morse
1791 – 1872 American inventor, painter
American painter turned inventor who developed a practical electric telegraph and the code that bears his name.
- Religion
- Calvinist
Samuel Morse trained as a portrait painter before turning to the electric telegraph. Working with others, he built a system that sent messages as pulses along a wire, coded in the dots and dashes now called Morse code. In 1844 he sent a famous first public message, What hath God wrought, over a line from Washington to Baltimore. The telegraph collapsed the time it took news and business to travel and laid groundwork for later electronic media.
In the timeline
- 1844 The electric telegraph mentioned
- 1844 Morse sends first telegraph message inventor of the system
- 1844 Morse sends the first telegraph message mentioned
- 1844 Morse sends his first long-distance telegraph message mentioned