70 Fun Facts About Samuel Morse

In which Massachusetts town was Samuel Morse born in 1791?

His first American ancestor, Anthony Morse, had emigrated from Wiltshire in 1635 and settled in Newbury, Massachusetts.

Morse's father Jedidiah was a Calvinist pastor and also a noted what?

Jedidiah Morse was a great preacher of the Calvinist faith and a supporter of the Federalist Party, and he tried hard to pass both on to his eldest son.

From which college did Morse graduate with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1810?

He attended lectures on electricity there from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day, and supported himself by painting.

Which school did Morse attend before college?

At college he studied religious philosophy, mathematics and science and belonged to the Society of Brothers in Unity.

Which American artist took Morse to England in 1811 to study painting?

Allston had been impressed by Morse's Landing of the Pilgrims and arranged with Morse's father a three-year stay to study under Benjamin West.

Which institution admitted Morse by the end of 1811, where he studied Michelangelo and Raphael?

He remained in England through the War of 1812, and his letters home grew increasingly anti-Federalist as the war dragged on.

What was the title of the masterpiece Morse painted in England after mastering life drawing?

He first made a sculpture as a study for the painting; his Judgment of Jupiter, also painted in England, is read by critics as a moral lesson on infidelity.

A blue plaque marks Morse's London home from 1812 to 1815. Where is it?

He left England on August 21, 1815, to begin his full-time career as a painter in the United States.

Which sitting president did Morse paint in 1820?

He had painted the Federalist former president John Adams four years earlier; the Panic of 1819 had cut into his commissions.

Morse's ambitious 1821 painting depicted which body at work by lamplight at night?

He placed eighty individuals inside the new Capitol chamber, but the picture failed to draw a crowd when exhibited in New York in 1823.

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

He posed the general against a sunset beside busts of Franklin and Washington, with a third pedestal apparently reserved for the sitter himself.

Which New York institution did Morse help found in 1826 and lead as president until 1845?

Forty-nine of his paintings were exhibited there, and he served a second term as president in 1861–62.

Morse's giant Paris canvas crammed 38 miniature masterpieces from which museum?

He set the picture aside on the voyage home in 1832 when the idea of the telegraph seized him, and finished it back in the United States.

With which American novelist did Morse become friends while in Paris around 1830?

Morse spent 1830 to 1832 travelling in Italy, Switzerland and France to improve his painting.

In 1832 Morse became America's first professor of painting and sculpture at the institution now known as what?

The post was at the University of the City of New York, and his will later endowed a physics medal awarded there every year.

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

Morse's letter to the New York Observer describing the daguerreotype was reprinted widely and gave America its first broad awareness of photography.

Which famous Civil War photographer initially studied under Morse?

Brady later took photographs of his old teacher.

Morse's estate at Poughkeepsie, New York, where some of his art is displayed, is called what?

He also bought land at what became Morsemere in Ridgefield, New Jersey, but died before the house there was completed.

Whose shipboard experiments with an electromagnet in 1832 gave Morse the idea of a single-wire telegraph?

The original telegraph Morse submitted with his patent application is now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Which British pair patented an electrical telegraph in May 1837, ahead of Morse?

They soon supplied the Great Western Railway with a 13-mile stretch of telegraph, but their multiple-wire method was overtaken by Morse's cheaper system.

With Leonard Gale's relays, Morse could soon send a message through how much wire?

Before that his signal died after a few hundred yards; Gale was a personal friend of the physicist Joseph Henry.

Which skilled, well-off young man joined Morse and Gale and did much of the work on the code?

Vail also played an important role in developing the code, and some historians argue the alphabet as we know it is really his.

In which New Jersey town was the telegraph first publicly demonstrated, at the Speedwell Ironworks on January 11, 1838?

Two miles of wire had been threaded through a nearby factory house so a local crowd could watch a message travel that distance.

What was the message of the first public telegraph transmission in 1838?

The demonstration's range was limited to two miles, but the relay system meant distance was no longer a fundamental limit.

Morse's first backer in Congress, Francis Ormand Jonathan Smith, represented which state?

His funding may have been the first instance of government support for a private researcher's applied work.

How much did Congress appropriate in 1843 for an experimental telegraph line?

The 38-mile line ran from Washington along the right-of-way of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

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

In December 1842 Morse had strung wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol to win over Congress.

On May 1, 1844, the new line carried news that the Whig Party had nominated whom for president?

The news reached the Capitol from the party's convention weeks before the line's official opening.

The famous first official message of May 24, 1844, was a verse from which book of the Bible?

The verse was Numbers 23:23, and Morse sent it from the Supreme Court chamber in the basement of the Capitol.

Who chose the words of the May 24, 1844 message?

She was the daughter of U.S. Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who had championed the invention and secured early funding.

The 1844 telegraph could transmit roughly how many characters per minute?

By 1850, 12,000 miles of telegraph wire had been laid across the United States.

Which sultan personally tested Morse's telegraph and granted him a patent in Istanbul in 1847?

The sultan also awarded him the diamond-set Order of Glory, the first of many foreign decorations.

King Frederick VII of Denmark decorated Morse in 1856 with which order?

Morse offered the king his 1831 portrait of the sculptor Thorvaldsen, which now belongs to Queen Margrethe II.

When Europe adopted Morse's apparatus as standard in 1851, which country alone kept the needle telegraph?

Britain, with its extensive overseas empire, stayed loyal to the system of Cooke and Wheatstone.

In 1858 Morse introduced wired communication to Latin America by building a telegraph line where?

The two-mile line linked his son-in-law's hacienda to a house in Arroyo, and Morse opened it in 1859 with a message calling the island a 'beautiful jewel'.

In 1836 Morse ran unsuccessfully for mayor of which city on an anti-immigrant Nativist ticket?

He received only 1,496 votes; he was a leader of the anti-Catholic movement and allegedly refused to remove his hat before the Pope in Rome.

Under what pen name did Morse publish Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States?

The book claimed the Austrian government and Catholic aid organizations were subsidizing immigration to seize control of the country.

Morse's brother Sidney edited which newspaper, to which Morse sent his anti-Catholic letters?

The letters, urging Protestants to fight the perceived Catholic menace, were widely reprinted in other papers.

In the 1850s Morse became a well-known defender of what, which he considered ordained by God?

In his treatise on the subject he wrote that 'the mere holding of slaves' had 'nothing of moral character in it'.

Which Chief Justice delivered the ruling in the 1853 telegraph patent case O'Reilly v. Morse?

The court upheld Morse's claim to his repeater system but denied his sweeping claim to all uses of electromagnetism for signalling.

In O'Reilly v. Morse, the Supreme Court rejected Morse's 'claim 8', which sought a monopoly on what?

The precedent later became the foundation of the law on whether software and natural-law inventions can be patented.

In 1858 a group of European governments jointly awarded Morse how much for their use of his invention?

France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany and the Ottoman Empire each paid a share based on how many Morse instruments they used.

What honorary title did Morse hold at Cyrus Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company?

He invested $10,000, sat on the board, and in 1856 helped test a 2,000-mile length of spooled cable in London.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable, completed in 1858, failed after how long in service?

Field's 1866 cable proved durable and began the era of reliable transatlantic service.

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

An 1820 design by Thomas Blanchard blocked the patent.

Morse died in 1872 and was buried where?

He died of pneumonia in New York City on April 2, 1872, leaving an estate valued at some $500,000.

A bronze statue of Morse, his first official American recognition, was unveiled in 1871 where?

It came less than a year before his death; foreign governments had honored him for decades by then.

Morse appeared with which fellow inventor on the reverse of the 1896 two-dollar silver certificate?

The note is displayed in the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's American Currency Exhibit.

What was Google's 2012 April Fools' joke that let users type Morse code on their phones?

Morse's great-great-grandnephew Reed Morse, a Google engineer, helped build the prank, which became a real product.

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

Each number would be looked up in a codebook to find the word it stood for; the code was expanded to letters in 1840.

How were English letter frequencies estimated when the alphabetic code was designed?

The count was made in the type cases of a local newspaper in Morristown, New Jersey, so the most common letters got the shortest codes.

Which letter, the most common in English, has the shortest code — a single dit?

Because code elements are defined by proportion rather than fixed duration, the code is sent at whatever rate the receiver can decode.

Which German telegraph pioneer's 1848 'Hamburg alphabet' became International Morse?

His code was first used between Hamburg and Cuxhaven and adopted in Germany and Austria in 1851.

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

The convention formed the International Telegraph Union, the precursor of today's ITU.

Which of these letters kept the same code from the original Morse into International Morse?

Only E, H, K and N survived unchanged; J was newly added, and O and P were taken from Steinheil's system.

In International Morse, a dah lasts how many times as long as a dit?

Letters are separated by a silence of three dits and words by a silence of seven dits.

Morse code was the maritime distress standard until the GMDSS replaced it in which year?

The French Navy's final Morse message in 1997 read: 'Calling all. This is our last call before our eternal silence.'

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

It ended with the prosign SK, meaning 'end of contact', and echoed the first message of 1844.

Theodore Roosevelt McElroy set a still-standing Morse copying record in 1939. What speed?

The contest was in Asheville, North Carolina; the fastest straight-key sending record, 35 WPM, was set by Harry Turner in 1942.

Which of these is one of the standard words used to measure Morse code speed in words per minute?

PARIS is the other; because letters have different lengths, a standard word is needed to compare operators.

Until 1991, a US amateur radio licence required Morse at a minimum of how many words per minute?

The FCC dropped Morse from all amateur licence requirements on February 23, 2007, four years after the World Radiocommunication Conference made it optional worldwide.

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

Blinking Morse has also let stroke patients who could neither speak nor write communicate with doctors.

The facetious nickname 'iddy-umpty' for Morse code gave English which word?

Operators voiced a dot as 'dit' and a dash as 'dah', with 'di' for dots inside a character.

In Morse abbreviations, the call CQ is understood to mean what?

It invites anyone who can hear the signal to reply; QRP means 'reduce power' and QTH is the operator's location.

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

Experienced operators can identify specific individuals by it alone; a sloppy sender has a 'poor fist'.

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

Fully automatic electronic keyers are called single-paddle or 'iambic' keys.

The first regular aviation radiotelegraphy was carried out from which type of aircraft?

They had room for the heavy radio equipment of the day; in 1910 a radio on the airship America helped coordinate its crew's rescue.

SOS is sent as a single prosign with no gaps between letters. What does it signify?

It can be sent by keying a radio, flashing a mirror or toggling a flashlight; all other stations go silent for the message.

In which New Hampshire town did Samuel Morse marry his first wife, Lucretia Pickering Walker, in 1818?

She died of a heart attack in February 1825 shortly after the birth of their third child; Morse remarried Sarah Elizabeth Griswold in 1848 and had four more children.

In which year was Samuel Morse inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame?

More than a century after his death, the honour recognised the single-wire telegraph and the code that bears his name.