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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Samuel Morse Biography MORSE, Samuel Finley Breese (1791–1872). An American artist and inventor. He was born at Charlestown, Mass., April 27, 1791, and graduated at Yale College in 1810. While in college he painted "miniatures on ivory at $5 and profiles at $1." Later, with the American painter Washington Allston, he visited England and studied there with Allston and with Benjamin West. In 1813 he received the gold medal of the Adelphi Society of Arts for a plaster model of the "Dying Hercules," which he had used in painting a large picture exhibited the same year at the Royal Academy. Returning to New York in 1815, he became in 1826 the first president of the National Academy of Design and was appointed in 1835 professor of the arts of design in the University of the City of New York. During this period he was constantly working on commissions, among his sitters being James Monroe, Chancellor Kent, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Lafayette. He did not give his entire attention to art, but was interested in chemistry and especially in electrical and galvanic experiments; his interest doubtless being awakened in the subject of electromagnetism through conversations with Prof. J. Freeman Dana, who lectured in New York on that subject in 1826–27 and exhibited an electromagnet. Morse first conceived the idea of the telegraph while on board the packet ship Sully on his way from Europe to America in 1832, while discussing the then recent discovery in France of a method for obtaining the electric spark from the magnet. Before the close of that year a portion of the apparatus which he had devised had been constructed in New York, but it was not until three years later that, in a room at the University, he showed the telegraph operating with half a mile of wire. In September, 1837, he made a public exhibition of his discovery and in that year filed his caveat at Washington. No result followed his appeal to Congress for aid during that session, and Professor Morse visited Europe with the hope of enlisting the interests of foreign governments in his invention. In this attempt he was unsuccessful, and he returned to New York, where, as well as in Washington, he struggled under serious privations during the four years which elapsed before he obtained (1843) congressional aid. In that year, after he had almost yielded to despair, Congress at midnight, in the last moments of the session, appropriated $30,000 for an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. After this aid had been granted, Morse succeeded after many difficulties in establishing a working telegraph line, and the first message, "What hath God wrought?" was sent from the rooms of the United States Supreme Court in the capitol at Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. From this time the telegraph was an assured success, but Professor Morse was frequently involved in litigation to maintain his rights under his patents. He also was engaged in numerous controversies. But the number and character of the honors heaped upon Professor Morse on account of his invaluable invention have probably never been equaled in the case of any other American. See Telegraph. Professor Morse set up the first daguerreotype apparatus and with Prof. John W. Draper was associated in taking the first daguerreotypes in America; he also laid the first submarine telegraph line (in New York harbor in 1842); and from him, in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States in 1843, seems to have come the first suggestion of an Atlantic telegraph. His last public act was the unveiling of a statue of Benjamin Franklin in Printing House Square, New York. He died in New York, April 2, 1872. Consult Prime, Life of S. F. B. Morse (New York, 1875), and E. L. Morse (ed.), his son, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, his Letters and Journals (2 vols., Boston, 1914). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVI (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 294. |