Samuel Morse was a celebrated painter long before he touched a telegraph
On a ship home from Europe in 1832, the painter Samuel Morse watched a fellow passenger, Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston, demonstrate experiments with an electromagnet. Morse set aside the huge canvas he had been working on and started sketching a telegraph that would send signals along a single wire.
That abandoned canvas says a lot about the career he was leaving behind. During two years in Italy, Switzerland and France he had painted miniature copies of 38 masterpieces from the Louvre onto one canvas six feet by nine, calling it The Gallery of the Louvre; he finished it after getting back to New York. He had already helped found the National Academy of Design there in 1826 and served as its president for almost two decades.
Art had been his route since youth. Born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on 27 April 1791, the eldest son of a Calvinist pastor and geographer, he paid his way through Yale by painting while sitting in on lectures about electricity, and graduated in 1810. The painter Washington Allston took him to England in 1811, where he entered the Royal Academy and produced the Dying Hercules, first modelling the figure as a sculpture. Back home he painted President James Monroe and the Marquis de Lafayette, and filled a view of the House of Representatives with eighty figures, though it drew thin crowds in New York in 1823.
His eye for new images went beyond paint. As the first professor of painting and sculpture in the country, at what became New York University, he met Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1839 and wrote a widely reprinted letter spreading word of the daguerreotype. Mathew Brady, later famous for Civil War photographs, studied under him.
The telegraph brought rivalry. In England, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone started later but patented their own electrical telegraph in May 1837 and reached commercial service first. Morse fought hard to be recognised as the sole inventor, and the code bearing his name, co-developed in 1837, became the main language of telegraphy worldwide. He died on 2 April 1872.
Source: Samuel Morse
