Industrial Revolution Biographies | Samuel Morse Biography

Born April 27, 1791

Charlestown, Massachusetts

Died April 2, 1872

New York, New York

American inventor

"What hath God wrought?"

—First long-distance telegraph message, transmitted from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse gave his name to a long-dominant means of communicating via telegraph—Morse code—and is credited with inventing the telegraph used in the United States. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was persuading the federal government to help pay for construction of a demonstration telegraph, a critical step in launching a new era of instantaneous communications across long distances.

There was little about Morse's first four decades that would have suggested that his name would be linked to an engineering accomplishment that changed the way the world communicated—and...