Samuel morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Boston, April 27, 1791 – New York, April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter who, along with his associate Alfred Vail, invented and installed a telegraphy system in the United States, the first of its kind. It was the Morse telegraph, which allowed messages to be transmitted using electrical pulses encrypted in Morse code, also invented by him.
On January 1, 1845, Morse and Vail inaugurated America's first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, which used their telegraph system.
Biography
Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, a neighborhood in urban Boston. He was the first son of the geographer and pastor Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese (1766-1828). He began his studies at the Phillips Academy in Andover, from where he went to Yale College, training in philosophy religious, mathematical and equine veterinary. And he also studied electricity with Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. He supported himself financially by painting. In 1810, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors.
In his student years he discovered his vocation for painting and decided to dedicate himself to it, but he was also attracted by recent discoveries and experiments regarding electricity. For a season, he worked in Boston for a publisher and later traveled to England to study drawing in London, and became a renowned painter of historical scenes. His most famous painting was the portrait of La Fayette (1825). Returning to New York, he had become one of the leading portrait painters in the country, and was part of the most distinguished intellectual groups. In 1826 he was one of the founders and the first president of the National Academy of Drawing.
At the age of 27 he met Lucrecia Walker, a beautiful and educated young woman with whom he fell in love. The couple married and had four children, but seven years later, shortly after the fourth was born, his wife died, leaving the inventor heartbroken. Despite being a genius, he did not earn much money as a painter and during those years he eked out a meager income. On occasions, he would go days without eating, while he expected payment for a painting or painting lesson.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse would later marry a second time.
His latent interest in electricity issues materialized during his return from a trip to Europe, which he undertook after Lucrecia's death. When he studied at Yale, he had learned that if a circuit was interrupted you would see a glow and it occurred to him that these interruptions could be used as a means of communication. This possibility haunted him.
When he reached land from that voyage in 1832, he had already designed a fledgling telegraph and was beginning to develop the idea of a wire telegraph system with a built-in electromagnet. On January 6, 1833, Morse made the first public demonstration of his telegraph.
At the age of forty-one, he set about building a practical telegraph and arousing public and government interest in the apparatus and then putting it into operation. In 1835 the first telegraph model developed by Morse appeared. Two years later he gave up painting to dedicate himself completely to his experiments, which would obscure his merits as a painter.
Activity in the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant movement
Morse was a leader in the American anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant movement of the mid-19th century. In 1836, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York for the Nativist party, receiving only 1,496 votes. Morse worked to unite Protestants against Catholic institutions (including schools), and wanted to ban Catholics from public office, as well as limit immigration from Catholic countries.
Pro-slavery
In the 1850s, Morse became known as an advocate of slavery in slavery, seeing it as sanctioned by God. In his treatise "An Argument Concerning the Ethical Position of Slavery", he wrote
My creed on the subject of slavery is brief. Slavery per se It's not sin. It is a social condition ordered from the beginning of the world for the most wise, benevolent and disciplinary purposes, by Divine Wisdom. The mere possession of slaves, therefore, is a condition that does not have per se nothing of a moral character in it, more than being a father, or an employer, or a ruler.
Last years
In 1840 he had already perfected his code of signals, which, based on dots and dashes, became known and used worldwide as "Morse code". He tried to establish telegraph lines first in the United States and then in Europe, but both attempts failed. Finally, Morse got his country's Congress to pass a bill to provide $30,000 earmarked for the construction of a 60 km telegraph line. Several months later the bill was approved, and the line was to run for 37 miles between Baltimore and Washington. It put on an impressive display on May 1, 1844, when news of Henry Clay's Whig Party nomination for President, was wired from your Convention in Baltimore to the Capitol in Washington.
On May 24, 1844, Morse delivered the message that would become so famous: "That God hath wrought us" (literal translation) or also: "What God has created" ("What hath God wrought", a quote from the Bible, Numbers 23:23) from the supreme court chamber in the basement of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. Despite the remarkableness of his work, Morse had to face opposition from superstitious people who blamed his invention for all ills.[citation needed] Furthermore, the invention was being developed simultaneously in other countries and by other scientists, so Morse was involved in lengthy litigation to obtain the rights to his system. These rights were finally recognized in 1854 by the Supreme Court of the United States.
With his invention, Morse made a large fortune with which he bought extensive property, and in his later years he devoted himself to doing philanthropic works, contributing considerable sums to schools such as Vassar College and Yale University as well as other missionary associations and charity.
Morse died of pneumonia on April 2, 1872, at the age of 80, at his home at 5 West 22nd Street, New York, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
Relays
Morse ran into the problem of getting the telegraph signal to transmit over more than a few hundred meters of cable. His breakthrough came from Professor Leonard Gale, who taught chemistry at New York University (he was a personal friend of Joseph Henry). With Gale's help, Morse introduced additional circuitry or relays at frequent intervals and was soon able to send a message over 10 miles (16.1 km) of wire. This was the breakthrough he had been looking for.Morse and Gale were soon joined by Alfred Vail, an enthusiastic young man with excellent skills, knowledge, and money.
At the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey on January 11, 1838, Morse and Vail made the first public demonstration of the electric telegraph. Although Morse and Alfred Vail had done most of the research and development at the ironworks facility, they chose a nearby factory house as their demonstration location. Without the repeater, Morse devised a system of electromagnetic relays. This was the key innovation, as it freed the technology from being limited by distance in sending messages. The range of the telegraph was limited to 2 miles (3.2 km), and the inventors had thrown 2 miles (3.2 km) of cables inside the factory house using an elaborate scheme. The first public broadcast, with the message 'A patient waiter is not a loser', was witnessed by a mostly local crowd.
Morse traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1838 seeking federal sponsorship for a telegraph line, but was unsuccessful. He went to Europe, seeking both patronage and patents, but in London he discovered that William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had already established priority. Upon his return to the United States, Morse finally secured the financial support of Maine Congressman Francis Ormand Jonathan Smith. This funding may be the first instance of government support for a private investigator, especially funding for applied (as opposed to basic or theoretical) research.
Extension of your system
The Morse telegraph apparatus was officially adopted as the standard for European telegraphy in 1851. Only the United Kingdom (with its vast British Empire abroad) maintained the Cooke and Wheatstone needle telegraph. (& # 34; It was in the month of J, a century ago, that Franklin made his celebrated experiment with the electric kite, by means of which he demonstrated the identity between electricity and lightning & # 34;.)
With the help of the US Ambassador to France, governments in Europe were spoken to about their long neglect of Morse while their countries used his invention. There was widespread recognition that something had to be done, and in 1858 Morse received the sum of 400,000 French francs (equivalent to about $80,000 at the time) from the governments of France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany and Turkey, each contributing a share according to the number of Morse instruments in use in each country. In 1858, he too was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1856, Morse went to Copenhagen and visited the Bertel Thorvaldsen Museum, where the sculptor's tomb is in the inner courtyard. He was received by King Frederick VII of Denmark, who awarded him the Order of the Dannebrog by telegraph. Morse expressed his wish to donate his 1831 Rome portrait of Thorvaldsen to the King. Thorvaldsen's portrait today belongs to Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
In Puerto Rico
In 1858, Morse introduced cable communication to Latin America when he established a telegraph system in Puerto Rico, then a Spanish colony. Morse's eldest daughter, Susan Walker Morse (1819-1885), often visited her uncle Charles Pickering Walker, owner of Hacienda Concordia in Guayama City. During one of her visits, she met Edward Lind, a Danish merchant who worked at the Hacienda La Henriqueta of her brother-in-law in the town of Arroyo. Later, they were married, Lind bought the Hacienda from her sister-in-law when she was widowed. Morse, who often spent winters at the Hacienda with his daughter and his son-in-law's, established a two-mile telegraph line connecting his son-in-law's Hacienda with his home in Arroyo. The line was inaugurated on March 1, 1859, in a ceremony flanked by the Spanish and American flags. The first words transmitted by Samuel Morse that day in Puerto Rico were:
Puerto Rico, beautiful jewel! When you are linked with the other jewels of the Antilles in the necklace of the world's telegraph, yours will not shine less brilliantly in the crown of your Queen! (Puerto Rico, beautiful jewel! When you are united to the other jewels of the Antilles in the world telegraph necklace, yours will shine no less in the crown of your Queen!)
Patents
- Patent 1.647, Improved way of communicating information through signals by the application of electromagnetism, June 20, 1840
- Patent 1.647 (Reissue #79), Improved way of communicating information through signals by the application of electromagnetism, January 15, 1846
- Patent 1.647 (Reedtion #117), Electromagnetic Telegraph Improvement, June 13, 1848
- Patent 1.647 (Reedtion #118), Electromagnetic Telegraph Improvement, June 13, 1848
- Patent 3.316, Method of introduction of cables in metal pipes, October 5, 1843
- Patent 4.453, Electromagnetic Telegraph Enhancement, April 11, 1846
- Patent 6.420, Improvement of electrical telegraphs, 1 May 1849
Eponymy
- The Morse code bears the name of your inventor.
- The Morse lunar crater carries this name in his memory.
- The asteroid (8672) Morse also commemorates its name.
- An Argentine town, Morse, bears its name.
Additional bibliography
- Andrew Wheen, DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM: How Modern Telecommunications Evolved from the Telegraph to the Internet (Springer, 2011) pp. 3–29
- James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America: Its Founders, Promoters and Noted Men New York: Arno Press, 1974.
- Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring A Continent, The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States 1832–1866 Princeton University Press, 1947.
- Vail, J. Cummings (1914). Early History of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, from Letters and Journals of Alfred Vail: Arranged by his Son, J. Cummings Vail. New York: Hine Brothers.
- Wolfe, Richard J. / Patterson, Richard (2007). Charles Thomas Jackson – "Head Behind The Hands" – Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America. Novato, California: Historyofscience.com.