Morse's 1837 telegraph receiver prototype, built with a canvas-stretcher. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives
A crowd of hushed spectators packed into the small red factory house at the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey, unsure of what to expect next. Samuel Morse, along with his colleagues Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, had packed over two miles of wire into the building, attempting to demonstrate to the public that his strange new invention could be used to transmit messages over long distances. Finally, the inventors manipulated a primitive transmitter, and a receiver scratched Morse’s simple message—”A patient waiter is no loser”—via a code of lines and curves. On this day in 1838, the small group of onlookers saw something special: the first-ever public demonstration of the telegraph.
Of course, as with all technological breakthroughs, the development of the telegraph had started years earlier, says curator Harold Wallace of the American History Museum. But unlike many other inventions, the telegraph was the result of an unusual mix of personal circumstances, artistic influences and pure happenstance. For the first four decades of his life, Morse was first and foremost an artist. “He was a painter of modest renown,” says Wallace. “Not top tier, perhaps, but his name was known.”
Morse was first provoked to think about communications technology because of a tragedy: in 1825, while painting the portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington, D.C., he received a letter indicating his wife was sick. By the time he reached his home in New Haven, Connecticut, she had already been buried. Stricken by grief, he vowed to develop a faster way to send messages in such crucial circumstances.
For several more years, Morse struggled in vain to succeed in the art world, but in 1832, serendipity intervened. On a transatlantic voyage, returning home from study in Europe, he met Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston physician and scientist, who showed him a rudimentary electromagnet he had devised.