Like many American inventors, Samuel F. B. Morse was fairly varied in his interests. While he was very well-known for his portrait paintings, he also ran for public office many times, and studied electricity. This led Morse to invent the electric telegraph.
Samuel Morse conceived the idea for the electric telegraph after a conversation with Charles Thomas Jackson, a rather eccentric doctor and inventor, while on a ship ride from Europe. The concept for the device was to send electrical pulses through long wires to communicate with other people around the state, or even around the world.
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While not part of his original design for the telegraph, Morse also developed a system of using dots and dashes to represent letters of the alphabet and numbers. Over time, this newly developed code soon came to be known as Morse Code.
Samuel tested his invention by using the miles of wires between Washington D. C. and Baltimore. In May1844, he sent a message from Washington to his partner in Baltimore saying: “What hath God wrought?” A few minutes later, his partner replied and this new invention was on its way to becoming part of American lifestyle. Telegraph lines were quickly stretched across the United States and Europe and were installed in Asia, Africa, and Australia by the end of the century. Telegraph cables (or wires) were also laid across the Atlantic Ocean.
Telegraph companies soon became one of the largest business endeavors of the nineteenth century, and Morse reaped the monetary benefits of his invention. The telegraph was constantly updated and used through the first half of the twentieth century. However, Morse code proved to be an extremely reliable and clear method for communication and it is still used today by ham radio operators, many Third World countries, cargo ships, and others who cannot afford or do not wish to depend only on satellites. The highly sophisticated United States’ shuttle craft even have a tiny telegraph key on the digital control panel of their high-frequency radios - just in case of emergencies. If only Samuel Morse could have seen how his inventions would be used in this new world of ours. I think he would have been pretty pleased with himself.
