Samuel Morse Trivia
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69 free Samuel Morse trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Samuel Morse trivia quiz covers both halves of an unusual life: the first forty years, in which Morse was one of America's leading portrait painters, and the second, in which he became the namesake of the telegraph code still used by radio amateurs today. The early questions deal with his Yale education, his years at the Royal Academy in London, his portraits of Monroe and Lafayette, the National Academy of Design he helped found, and his encounter with Daguerre and photography. The middle of the quiz follows the telegraph from a shipboard conversation in 1832 through the relay breakthrough with Leonard Gale, the partnership with Alfred Vail, the first demonstration at Speedwell Ironworks, the $30,000 congressional grant, and the famous 'What hath God wrought' message of 24 May 1844. It then turns to the patent fights, the Supreme Court case O'Reilly v. Morse, the European honors, the transatlantic cable and Morse's unattractive politics. The final questions are about the code itself: how Vail worked out letter frequencies, Friedrich Gerke's revisions, the 1865 international standard, SOS, speed records, the last commercial transmissions and the end of the Morse test for radio licences. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Samuel Morse and Morse code.
30 of 69 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Morse was born in Charlestown, site of Bunker Hill, now part of which city?
Boston
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.
Q 02Morse's pastor father Jedidiah won fame as what for schoolbooks on the young United States?
Geographer
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.
Q 03Morse graduated in 1810 from which New England college, where he painted classmates' miniature portraits for money?
Yale
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.
Q 04Morse's receiver marked dots and dashes on a paper tape, but operators soon found it quicker to take messages how?
By ear
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.
Q 05Morse painted his New Haven neighbour Noah Webster, who was then compiling what?
An American dictionary
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.
Q 06Which London institution admitted the young Morse as an art student after he reached England in 1811?
The Royal Academy
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.
Q 07Which mythical hero did Morse model in plaster, then paint dying on a huge canvas in London?
Hercules
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.
Q 08New York's rival newspapers pooled the cost of rushing in distant news in the 1840s, founding which agency?
The Associated Press
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.
Q 09Which Virginian president sat for Morse while in office around 1820?
James Monroe
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.
Q 10Morse crowded more than eighty portraits into his 1820s painting of which body in its Capitol chamber?
The House of Representatives
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.
Q 11Which French supporter of the American Revolution did Morse paint in a grand 1825 portrait?
Marquis de Lafayette
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.
Q 12Morse became founding president of the National Academy of Design in 1826, a breakaway school run by and for whom?
Working artists
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.
Q 13Morse's giant canvas crammed dozens of miniature Old Masters into one room of which museum?
Q 21Which young machinist became Morse's partner in 1837, building the instruments at his family's ironworks in New Jersey?
Alfred Vail
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.
Q 22In which New Jersey town, a winter camp of Washington's army, was the telegraph first shown publicly at Speedwell Ironworks?
Morristown
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.
Q 23What was the first message Morse's telegraph carried at New Jersey's Speedwell works in 1838?
The Louvre
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.
Q 14Which American novelist became Morse's close friend while both lived in France around 1830?
James Fenimore Cooper
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.
Q 15In 1832 Morse became professor of painting and sculpture at a newly founded Manhattan university now known as what?
New York University
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.
Q 16Which pioneer of photography did Morse meet in Paris in 1839?
Louis Daguerre
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.
Q 17Which famous Civil War photographer initially studied under Morse?
Mathew Brady
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.
Q 18Morse's Locust Grove estate near Poughkeepsie overlooks which river?
The Hudson
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.
Q 19Which pair patented an electrical telegraph in 1837, months before Morse filed for his own?
Cooke and Wheatstone
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.
Q 20Which devices, added along Morse's telegraph line, removed the limit on how far a message could travel?
Relays
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.
A patient waiter is no loser
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.
Q 24Morse quit painting for good in 1837 after Congress passed him over for a commission to decorate which space?
The Capitol Rotunda
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.
Q 25Which future university founder's plough buried the cable for Morse's first line?
Ezra Cornell
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.
Q 26The 1843 experimental line connected Washington, D.C., with which city?
Baltimore
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.
Q 27On May 1, 1844, the unfinished line carried word that the Whigs had nominated which former Secretary of State for president?
Henry Clay
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.
Q 28Morse's famous first official message in May 1844 quoted which of the five books of Moses?
Numbers
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.
Q 29Whose young daughter chose the words of Morse's first official telegram?
The patent commissioner's
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.
Q 30Mocking the 1843 bill to fund Morse's 'magnetic' telegraph, a congressman proposed giving half the money to which fringe science?
Mesmerism
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.