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Young World
Samuel Morse
V.K. SUBRAMANIAN
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Samuel Morse’s(1791 A.D. – 1872 A.D.) invention advanced the speed of communication.
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Illustration: V.K. SUBRAMANIAN
Samuel Morse was the inventor of the telegraph.Though he was originally an artist, how he came to invent the telegraph is an interesting story.
While travelling home to America from Europe in 1832, he overheard C.T. Jackson, a fellow passenger and amateur scientist, remark that the flow of electricity is unhindered by the length of the wire. “If this be so,” Morse reasoned, “I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance.”
So he set out to make a telegraph.
In 1844, he got the first American telegraph line built from Baltimore to Washington, by persuading the American Congress to sanction $30,000.
Dots and dashes
Using his Morse code of dots and dashes, he sent his famous message: “What hath God wrought?’
As someone remarked, “Morse invention was the biggest advance in the speed of communications, since the horse!”
By 1900, telegraph lines crisscrossed the globe.
Morse was born on April 27, 1791, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of a priest.
He graduated from Yale University in 1810 and went to England to study art.
Morse would have been a great artist, if he had not made his earth shaking invention of the Telegraph.
He died on April 2, 1872 at New York.
Posthumously he was made a charter member of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans.
His painting Gallery of the Louvre fetched $3.5 million in 1982.
Morse once showed his painting of a man in agony to a doctor friend and asked his opinion. “Malaria!” declared the doctor, without hesitation.
This is an extract from the book The Great Ones by V.K.Subramanian, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi
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Correction:In the article Adam Smith that appeared in the Young World dt. November 16, the year when he was tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch was mentioned as 1863. It should have been 1763.
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