Samuel morse who invented the telegraph

Samuel Morse, born on April 27, years ago is best known for inventing Morse code. In February , Morse was in Washington, D. At age 34, he was older than his heroes had been when they created their masterpieces. She was expecting their third child. And Morse indulged that hope. Lucretia had died a few days earlier of an apparent heart attack while recovering from childbirth.

Morse, whose life had been filled with disappointments and lost commissions, suffered another defeat, this time caused by slow communication. He rushed back to his family, but by the time he got back to New Haven, Lucretia was already buried. On board, he got involved in conversations about electromagnetism, and how it could travel through wires, and how it could send information faster than anyone had previously imagined.

He went to lectures on electricity. He secretly began working on a way of encoding and sending messages. He also ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor of New York City on an anti-immigrant platform.

There had been experiments with sending electricity through wires before Morse was born. And there had been telegraph machines for years already, mostly in Europe. Operators sometimes used telescopes to see the messages.

Others had the idea to make them more efficient, but Morse, with his tenacity and his code of dots and dashes, got his plan in front of Congress. In , he returned to Washington, to the scene of his greatest heartbreak, and tried to convince lawmakers to fund his telegraph. Again, he failed. Four years later, Morse, driven, went back to Washington and rigged a telegraph between two committee rooms to show off the technology that might have given him a chance to share a final few moments with Lucretia, or at least to attend her funeral.

He strung the wire to Baltimore. And on May 24, , he sent the first message. Soon, all types of news and messages were being tapped out across the country. Among these improvements was the invention of good insulation for telegraph wires. The man behind this innovation was Ezra Cornell , one of the founders of the university in New York that bears his name.

Another improvement, by the famed inventor Thomas Alva Edison in , was the Quadruplex system, which allowed for four messages to be transmitted simultaneously using the same wire. Use of the telegraph was quickly accepted by people eager for a faster and easier way of sending and receiving information. However, widespread and successful use of the device required a unified system of telegraph stations among which information could be transmitted.

The Western Union Telegraphy Company, founded in part by Cornell, was at first only one of many such companies that developed around the new medium during the s.

By , however, Western Union had laid the first transcontinental telegraph line, making it the first nationwide telegraph company. Telegraph systems spread across the world, as well. Extensive systems appeared across Europe by the later part of the 19th century, and by the first permanent telegraph cable had been successfully laid across the Atlantic Ocean; there were 40 such telegraph lines across the Atlantic by The electric telegraph transformed how wars were fought and won and how journalists and newspapers conducted business.

Rather than taking weeks to be delivered by horse-and-carriage mail carts, pieces of news could be exchanged between telegraph stations almost instantly. Even by the end of the 19th century, however, new technologies began to emerge, many of them based on the same principles first developed for the telegraph system.

In time, these new technologies would overshadow the telegraph, which would fall out of regular widespread usage. Although the telegraph has since been replaced by the even more convenient telephone, fax machine and Internet, its invention stands as a turning point in world history. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

Morse had an earlier career as an accomplished painter. The son of a Calvinist preacher, Massachusetts-born Samuel F. Morse studied philosophy and mathematics at Yale University before turning his attention to the arts, eventually travelling to England in to study Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal.

In his 84 years, Thomas Edison acquired a record number of 1, patents singly or jointly and was the driving force behind such innovations as the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb and one of the earliest motion picture cameras. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War.

For years, scientists and This coding system was significantly better, as it did not require printing or decoding but could be "sound read" by operators. In , at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York, Morse transmitted ten words per minute using the Morse code that would become standard throughout the world.

Meanwhile, Morse also solicited and received advice from a number of American and European telegraphy experts, including Joseph Henry of Princeton, who had invented a working telegraph in , and Louis Breguet of Paris. In , Morse filed for a patent granted in of the printing telegraph. He had already proved that his device worked over short distances, and the Federal funds that he raised had allowed him to string a wire from Baltimore to Washington.

On May 11, , Morse sent the first inter-city message. Soon thereafter, he gave the first public demonstration, in which he sent a message from the chamber of the Supreme Court to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore.

The message itself was borrowed from the Bible by the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents and said, "What hath God wrought? The telegraph spread across the U. By , there were 23, miles of telegraph wire in operation. Western Union was founded in , and in , the first successful trans-Atlantic cable link was established.

Though Morse didn't invent the telegraph and did not single-handedly create Morse Code, he may have been telegraphy's greatest promoter and undoubtedly contributed to its rapid development and adoption throughout the world. Morse died of pneumonia in New York on April 2, Late in his life, he shared his considerable wealth through grants to colleges such as Yale and Vassar, in addition to charities and artists.