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Samuel Finley Breese Morse 1791–1872, American inventor and artist, b. Charlestown, Mass., grad. Yale, 1810. He studied painting in England under Washington Allston and achieved some success. He returned to the United States in 1815, took up portrait painting, and gained a considerable reputation in this field. He was a founder (1825) of the National Academy of Design. He spent the years from 1829 to 1832 in further European study. His interest in electricity, aroused in his college days, was further stimulated by the lectures of James F. Dana in 1827 and later by contacts with members of the faculty of New York Univ. Learning in 1832 of AmpEre's idea for the electric telegraph, Morse worked for the next 12 years, with the aid of Leonard Gale, Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail, to perfect his own version of the instrument. So many phases of the telegraph, however, had already been anticipated by other inventors, especially in Great Britain, Germany, and France, that Morse's originality as the inventor of telegraphy has been questioned; even the Morse code did not differ greatly from earlier codes, including the semaphore. In any case, Morse in 1844 demonstrated to Congress the practicability of his instrument by transmitting the famous message "What hath God wrought" over a wire from Washington to Baltimore. Morse subsequently was compelled to defend his invention in court, although by then he commanded the acclaim of the world. He later experimented with submarine cable telegraphy. Both Morse and John Draper were instrumental in introducing the daguerreotype in the United States.
See his letters and journals, ed. by E. L. Morse (1914, repr. 1973); biographies by C. Mabee (1943, repr. 1969) and P. Staiti (1989).
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