Q 01/05

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

A) Cambridge

B) Boston

C) Lexington

D) Concord

Answer · why

B) 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 h...

Q 02/05

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

A) Surveyor

B) Astronomer

C) Naturalist

D) Geographer

Answer · why

D) 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 e...

Q 03/05

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

A) Harvard

B) Dartmouth

C) Princeton

D) Yale

Answer · why

D) 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 paint...

Q 04/05

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

A) By dial

B) By touch

C) By ear

D) By lamp

Answer · why

C) 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 d...

Q 05/05

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

A) A national atlas

B) A farmers' almanac

C) A federal law code

D) An American dictionary

Answer · why

D) 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 ...