69 Fun Facts About Samuel Morse

Morse was born in Charlestown, site of Bunker Hill, now part of which city?

Boston bookselling was the career his parents picked for him: after college he clerked for his father's publisher there, until they relented and let him sail for England to study painting.

Morse's pastor father Jedidiah won fame as what for schoolbooks on the young United States?

Geographer: seeing that the new nation had no geography textbook of its own, Jedidiah Morse wrote Geography Made Easy in 1784, and its many editions earned him the title father of American geography.

Morse graduated in 1810 from which New England college, where he painted classmates' miniature portraits for money?

Yale is where he first heard lectures on electricity, but he was an indifferent scholar who, to his strict parents' distress, cared far more for painting; the science paid off only decades later.

Morse's receiver marked dots and dashes on a paper tape, but operators soon found it quicker to take messages how?

By ear: the receiver clicked as it marked the tape, and operators learned to write messages down from the sound alone, so the paper record Morse had designed the machine around was dropped.

Morse painted his New Haven neighbour Noah Webster, who was then compiling what?

An American dictionary was Webster's great work, published in 1828; Morse painted him and the cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney because Americans would not buy his grand history scenes, so likenesses of local worthies paid the bills.

Which London institution admitted the young Morse as an art student after he reached England in 1811?

The Royal Academy brought him lessons from the American-born painter Benjamin West; when the War of 1812 broke out he stayed on in London, and his letters home turned fiercely pro-American.

Which mythical hero did Morse model in plaster, then paint dying on a huge canvas in London?

Hercules won him a gold medal as a statuette and critical acclaim as a painting, but back home Americans had no taste for grand history pictures, and he reluctantly fell back on portraits for a living.

New York's rival newspapers pooled the cost of rushing in distant news in the 1840s, founding which agency?

The Associated Press began as a pact among competing New York dailies to share the cost of getting distant news fast, by mounted courier and then over the new telegraph wires, which turned rivals into partners.

Which Virginian president sat for Morse while in office around 1820?

James Monroe sat for him on a commission from the city of Charleston, in brief snatches between calls of office, yet the president's daughter said her father thought it the only portrait that really looked like him.

Morse crowded more than eighty portraits into his 1820s painting of which body in its Capitol chamber?

The House of Representatives was meant to tour the country and draw paying crowds, but after eighteen months' work the public stayed away and the exhibition lost money.

Which French supporter of the American Revolution did Morse paint in a grand 1825 portrait?

Marquis de Lafayette was on his triumphal tour of America when Morse won the City of New York's $1,000 commission against a field of rival painters, a welcome success after a run of failures.

Morse became founding president of the National Academy of Design in 1826, a breakaway school run by and for whom?

Working artists felt neglected by the older American Academy and its unsympathetic president, the painter John Trumbull, so Morse led the younger painters out and stayed president of their own academy for most of two decades.

Morse's giant canvas crammed dozens of miniature Old Masters into one room of which museum?

The Louvre never hung them together: he gathered his favourites into one imagined room, hoping to bring Europe's art to Americans, but the public stayed away and it sold for about half his asking price.

Which American novelist became Morse's close friend while both lived in France around 1830?

James Fenimore Cooper was close enough that Morse painted the novelist and his family into a corner of his great museum picture, and a relative of the writer later bought the canvas.

In 1832 Morse became professor of painting and sculpture at a newly founded Manhattan university now known as what?

New York University turned out to matter more for his science than his art: he built his telegraph in his studio there, and a science colleague, Leonard Gale, helped him push the signal through miles of wire.

Which pioneer of photography did Morse meet in Paris in 1839?

Louis Daguerre, like Morse a painter turned inventor, showed him the new pictures in March 1839, and Morse's excited letter home became the first account of the process printed in America.

Which famous Civil War photographer initially studied under Morse?

Mathew Brady was one of several pupils who learned the new art in the photography studio Morse opened in 1840, and the pupil later turned his camera on his old teacher.

Morse's Locust Grove estate near Poughkeepsie overlooks which river?

The Hudson estate was the reward of success: he bought it in 1847, soon after his telegraph triumph, and had the cottage on it rebuilt as an Italian-style villa.

Which pair patented an electrical telegraph in 1837, months before Morse filed for his own?

Cooke and Wheatstone made needles point at letters on a board, so operators needed no code, but the instrument wanted six wires where Morse's needed one, and the cheaper single-wire rival spread further.

Which devices, added along Morse's telegraph line, removed the limit on how far a message could travel?

Relays let each fading pulse switch on a fresh circuit further down the line, so distance stopped mattering; by November 1837 a message was running through ten miles of wire.

Which young machinist became Morse's partner in 1837, building the instruments at his family's ironworks in New Jersey?

Alfred Vail built the simple tapping key, and his advocates credit him with the dot-and-dash alphabet too, a claim that Morse's son publicly disputed.

In which New Jersey town, a winter camp of Washington's army, was the telegraph first shown publicly at Speedwell Ironworks?

Morristown's Speedwell works belonged to the family of his young partner, whose money and workshop turned a painter's crude prototype into a machine fit to show the neighbours.

What was the first message Morse's telegraph carried at New Jersey's Speedwell works in 1838?

A patient waiter is no loser was what his partner's sceptical father wrote on a slip of paper, saying that if it could be sent and read at the far end he would be convinced; it was, and his doubts vanished.

Morse quit painting for good in 1837 after Congress passed him over for a commission to decorate which space?

The Capitol Rotunda commission was the prize he had chased for years as a history painter; when the committee passed him over he gave up the brush entirely and poured everything into his telegraph.

Which future university founder's plough buried the cable for Morse's first line?

Ezra Cornell's pipe-laying plough worked, but the wire's insulation failed, so the line went up on poles instead; he stayed in the business and made the telegraph fortune that later endowed his university.

The 1843 experimental line connected Washington, D.C., with which city?

Baltimore was the natural end of the line because the wire could simply follow the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's tracks out of Washington, finishing at the railroad's own depot.

On May 1, 1844, the unfinished line carried word that the Whigs had nominated which former Secretary of State for president?

Henry Clay's nomination was wired from a junction partway along the line and reached Washington well ahead of the train carrying the same news; he went on to lose, his third defeat for the presidency.

Morse's famous first official message in May 1844 quoted which of the five books of Moses?

Numbers 23:23 gave him the words, sent from the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol; the minister's son took them literally, writing to his brother that the work was God's and not his own.

Whose young daughter chose the words of Morse's first official telegram?

The patent commissioner's daughter Annie brought Morse the news that Congress had funded his line, and he promised her the first message in return; her father, an old college classmate, had championed the telegraph.

Mocking the 1843 bill to fund Morse's 'magnetic' telegraph, a congressman proposed giving half the money to which fringe science?

Mesmerism, also called animal magnetism, was Cave Johnson's joke amendment; it failed, and once the line worked he told Morse, 'Sir, I give in. It is an astonishing invention,' then ran it himself as Postmaster General.

Which empire's ruler watched the telegraph at work and sent Morse a decoration set in diamonds?

The Ottoman sultan was the first foreign ruler to honour Morse's invention, and about a decade later Turkey joined the European governments that paid him for using it.

Morse was knighted by the king of which country, where electricity's link to magnetism was discovered?

Denmark knighted him in 1856; after his audience with the king he wrote of sitting at the table where Ørsted had found that a current deflects a magnetic needle, a discovery without which, he said, his invention could not have been made.

As Europe took up Morse's system in the 1850s, which country stuck with its own needle telegraph instead?

The United Kingdom had pioneered a telegraph whose needles pointed to letters, and the Post Office swapped it for Morse's system only slowly; when Europe's governments rewarded him in 1858, Britain gave nothing.

In 1859 Morse built the first telegraph line on which Caribbean island, now a US territory?

Puerto Rico got its first line when he ran two miles of wire from his son-in-law's plantation, and its opening was celebrated at a ceremony decked with the Spanish and American flags.

Morse ran for which office in New York in 1836, heading an anti-immigrant ticket that drew barely 1,500 votes?

Mayor was the office he sought twice, in 1836 and again in 1841, on anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic tickets; admirers of the gentleman artist thought he had taken leave of his senses, and he polled only 1,496 votes.

Morse signed his 1835 anti-Catholic tract Foreign Conspiracy with which pen name, shared with an enemy of Julius Caesar?

Brutus was his mask for newspaper articles warning that Catholic monarchies were sending immigrants to undermine the republic; gathered into a book, they were followed within a year by his own run for office on a nativist ticket.

How were Sidney and Richard Morse, founders of the weekly that ran his anti-Catholic letters, related to Samuel Morse?

His brothers founded the New York Observer in 1823 and ran the religious weekly for decades; it printed far more than his politics, including the letter from France that gave America its first news of photography.

Morse, a New England minister's son, defended what as 'a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world'?

Slavery, he wrote, was no sin in itself; though he dreaded disunion his sympathies lay with the South, and the son who edited his letters conceded that in the light of later events he was on the wrong side.

Which Chief Justice delivered the 1850s Supreme Court ruling that upheld Morse's telegraph patent?

Roger B. Taney held that the advice Morse took from men of science did not impair his right to be called the inventor, since nothing built from known elements could be invented without such knowledge.

The Supreme Court struck out 'claim 8' of the Morse telegraph patent, which sought a monopoly on what?

Any use of electromagnetism for signals, however achieved, went beyond what he had invented, the Court said, so rivals stayed free to find other methods; 160 years later the justices cited the case in a landmark software-patent ruling.

Which state organised the 400,000 francs that ten European governments paid Morse in 1858?

The French Empire's foreign minister, Count Walewski, gathered the governments after years in which they had run Morse instruments without paying him; each gave in proportion to how many it had in use.

What title did Morse hold on Cyrus Field's first attempt to lay an Atlantic telegraph cable?

Electrician was his post aboard the USS Niagara in 1857, but the cable snapped a few days out and the ships turned back; a lasting line was not laid until 1866.

The first official message over the 1858 Atlantic cable was a greeting to President Buchanan from which monarch?

Queen Victoria's greeting was the new cable's showpiece, but the signals soon grew faint and the line went dead within weeks of its completion.

Morse invented, but could not patent, a machine to carve 3D sculptures from what material?

Marble or stone was what the machine cut, copying sculpture in the round, but he found that it infringed a design Thomas Blanchard had made in 1820, which left him nothing to patent.

Morse died in 1872 and was buried in which Brooklyn cemetery?

Green-Wood Cemetery drew some half a million visitors a year in the 1860s, and the crowds strolling its landscaped hills helped inspire the creation of America's big public parks.

A bronze statue of Morse, funded partly by telegraph operators' small gifts, was unveiled in 1871 in which park?

Central Park's statue went up while he was still alive; that evening, aged 80, he sent a farewell message by wire to telegraph operators around the world.

An 1896 two-dollar bill paired Morse's portrait with that of which steam pioneer?

Robert Fulton, the steamboat builder, and Morse stood on the back as the men behind Steam and Electricity, the two children pictured on its face; the ornate note lasted only until a plainer design replaced it in 1899.

What did Google call its 2012 April Fools' joke that replaced the phone keyboard with Morse code?

Gmail Tap shrank the keyboard from 26 keys to little more than a dot and a dash. Six years later the joke caught up with reality, when Google built a working Morse keyboard into Gboard as an accessibility tool.

In his earliest code design, what did Morse plan to transmit exclusively?

Numerals were all his first scheme sent: each group stood for a word listed in a special dictionary, so every message had to be looked up at both ends, a chore that ended once each letter had a signal of its own.

How were English letter frequencies estimated when the Morse alphabet was being designed?

By counting a newspaper's movable type the designers borrowed a printer's experience: he stocks most of the letters he needs most, so the fullest compartments showed which deserved the shortest signals.

Which letter has the shortest signal in Morse code, one single dot?

E is the commonest letter in English, which is why it was given the quickest signal of all; T, the runner-up, got a single dash.

International Morse code is largely Friedrich Gerke's 1848 rewrite, made for a telegraph line in which present-day country?

Germany's Hamburg to Cuxhaven line used Gerke's version, which swept away the American code's long dashes and odd gaps so that only dots and dashes remained; Europe adopted it while America kept the original.

International Morse Code was standardized at an 1865 International Telegraph Convention in which city?

Paris drew envoys of 20 states tired of seeing messages stopped at each border and translated into the next country's system; the union they founded there survives as the ITU.

The BBC's wartime 'V for Victory' call sign matched the Morse letter V, dot-dot-dot-dash, with the opening of which symphony?

Beethoven's Fifth opens short-short-short-long, the Morse V, so the BBC used those four notes to open its broadcasts to occupied Europe; by a happy accident, a Roman V is also a five.

Morse operators voice a dot as 'dit'; which syllable, three times as long, voices a dash?

Dah is the dash, and a dit inside a letter is clipped to 'di', so operators chant L as di-dah-di-dit, learning each letter as a rhythm.

In 1999 ships dropped Morse code as their distress standard for a system built around what?

Satellites and automatic radio beacons now raise the alarm on their own, where Morse relied on skilled operators spending long hours listening on the distress frequency.

The last commercial Morse transmission in the United States, in 1999, signed off with which message?

What hath God wrought, his own 1844 opener, closed the era from a coast station near San Francisco; enthusiasts soon began marking the anniversary by putting the old stations back on the air for a 'Night of Nights'.

Morse was a founding trustee of which women's college, set up in the 1860s near his Poughkeepsie estate?

Vassar College's founder, Matthew Vassar, wrote to his celebrated neighbour as the plans took shape in 1861, and Morse promised to further the scheme as far as he could, joining its first board of trustees.

Which liner's wireless operators began with the old Morse distress call CQD before trying the newer SOS as she sank?

Titanic's senior operator, Jack Phillips, started with CQD, the Marconi company's own call; his junior, Harold Bride, urged him to try SOS as well, joking that it might be his last chance to send it.

Until 2007 US regulators made enthusiasts of which hobby pass a Morse code test for a full licence?

Amateur radio lost its Morse test after a 2003 world conference let each country decide for itself; by then the United States asked for only five words a minute, down from twenty for the top licence.

Which word did POW Jeremiah Denton blink in Morse during a 1966 North Vietnamese TV interview?

TORTURE, spelled out blink by blink as he answered his captors' questions, confirmed what US intelligence had only suspected; freed in 1973, he was later elected senator for Alabama.

Which word for a vague big number came from signallers' slang for a Morse dash?

Umpteen comes from 'umpty', the dash in 'iddy-umpty', a joking name for Morse code; soldiers stretched umpty to mean any big vague number, and First World War army slang spread the form ending in -teen.

In Morse shorthand, the call CQ is popularly read as which phrase?

Seek you is only how the letters sound: British landline telegraphers were using CQ as a general call to every station before radio existed, and in 1904 Marconi's company added a D to make its distress call, CQD.

A Morse operator's individual, recognizable sending style is known as their what?

Fist is the word, and it could give a ship away: in both world wars listeners who had learned an enemy operator's rhythm used it to track his ship or submarine.

Mechanical semi-automatic Morse keyers are informally known as what?

Bugs make their dots automatically with a swinging pendulum, so the operator only forms the dashes. They were built to spare telegraphers the wrist injury they called glass arm.

Morse signals from which type of craft, in trouble over the ocean in 1910, summoned a steamer to its rescue?

Airships: when engine trouble left the America adrift in 1910, its crew signalled the steamer Trent by lamp and then by radio. All six men and their cat, Kiddo, were saved, and the empty airship drifted off, never to be seen again.

SOS was never an abbreviation, so why was that Morse pattern picked as the distress call?

It is hard to mistake: dots, then dashes, then dots again, sent as one unbroken run. Phrases such as 'Save Our Souls' were fitted to the letters only afterwards.

Word of whose death in 1825 reached Morse so slowly that the burial was over before he got home?

His wife, Lucretia, died suddenly at 25 while he was away in the capital painting a portrait. The news came by letter, and she was already buried when he got back to New Haven.

Which mail service shut down in October 1861, days after Morse telegraph wires first linked California to the East?

The Pony Express had cut coast-to-coast mail to about 10 days, but riders could not outrun a wire. It closed after only a year and a half in business.