Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872) was an American inventor and painter. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and graduated from Yale College in 1810, where he attended lectures on electricity. After establishing his reputation as a portrait painter, he contributed in middle age to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. In 1832, on a ship returning from Europe, he met Charles Thomas Jackson, a man who was well schooled in electromagnetism; witnessing experiments with Jackson’s electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph.
To make a signal carry over more than a few hundred yards of wire, Morse introduced extra circuits, or relays, at frequent intervals with the help of Leonard Gale, and was soon able to send a message through ten miles of wire. With the engineer Alfred Vail, who joined them, he gave the first public demonstration of their telegraph on 11 January 1838 in Morristown, New Jersey. On 24 May 1844 the telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore was officially opened with the message ‘What hath God wrought’.
Morse and Vail developed an electrical telegraph system whose signals were simply on or off, building on the work of the physicist Joseph Henry. This made it desirable to find a method of transmitting natural language using only electrical pulses and the silence between them, and around 1837 Morse devised such a method. Morse code (German: Morsecode) is named after Morse, who was one of several developers of the system. It encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes; a dash lasts three times as long as a dot. His earliest design for a code was meant to transmit only numerals and to look up each word in a codebook. Vail developed the letter code from 1838 and extended it in 1840, and he assigned the shortest sequences of dots and dashes to the most common letters; E, the most common letter in English, has a single dot. The International Morse code in use today is derived from a proposal by Friedrich Gerke of 1848 and was standardized in Paris on 17 May 1865.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Morse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
Image source: Wikimedia Commons (public domain, Mathew Benjamin Brady)
