The Alamo Samuel FB Morse
The Alamo - Samuel F.B. MorseSamuel F. B. Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27, 1791, in Charlestown, just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. His father was Jedidiah Morse, a well- respected pastor and a writer. His mother was Elizabeth Ann Breese.
Samuel’s parents had high hopes for their oldest son. When he was seven, they sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover. Although he was clearly smart, Samuel as a student was disappointing. He spent most of his time goofing off and drawing.
At Yale College, Morse was an unsure student, but his interests were lectures of the then newly developing subject of electricity, and painting miniature portraits.
After college, Morse directed his enthusiasm especially to painting, which he studied in England. After settling in New York City in 1825, he became one of the most respected painters of his time. He also got married to Lucretia.
Morse was very sociable, at home he was strong in politics. A natural leader, he was a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design, but was defeated in his campaigns to become mayor of New York or a Congressman.
In 1832, while returning on the ship Sully from another period of art study in Europe, Morse heard a conversation about the newly discovered electromagnet and thought of the idea of an electric telegraph. He mistakenly thought that the idea of such a telegraph was new, thus helping to give him the willingness to push the idea forward.By 1835 he probably had his first telegraph model working in the New York University building where he taught art. Being poor, Morse used in his model such crude materials as an old artist’s canvas stretcher to hold it, a homemade battery and old clockwork to move the paper on which dots and dashes were to be recorded.
In 1837 Morse acquired two partners to help him develop his telegraph. One was Leonard Gale, a quiet professor of science at New York University who advised him, for example, on how to increase voltage by increasing the number of turns around the electromagnet. The other was Alfred Vail, who made available both his mechanical skills and his family’s New Jersey iron works to help construct better telegraph models.With the aid of his new partners, Morse applied for a patent for his new telegraph in 1837, which he described as including a dot and dash code to represent numbers, including a dictionary to turn the numbers into words. Morse,...
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