Hero Tales from History — How Morse Sent Letters by Lightning

HOW MORSE SENT LETTERS BY LIGHTNING

Into the family of Doctor Morse, a much respected minister living on the side of the hill on which the battle of Bunker Hill was fought, there came a little baby boy.

They named him Samuel Finley for his great-grandfather, a president of Princeton College.

To this was added Breese, the maiden name of the boy’s mother.

When this baby grew up, he was known all over the world as S. F.

B.

Morse.

This Morse boy had the best kind of schooling at home.

His father was a teacher as well as a preacher, and wrote the Morse geographies which were used in the schools of that day.

Finley, as he was called at home, showed real talent as a boy for drawing and painting.

One of his first pictures showed the Morse family around a table, with the father teaching them from a large globe showing all the countries of the world.

Finley Morse was sent to Yale College, where he was much interested in science and philosophy.

But he kept at his drawing and coloring, and became a successful painter.

That was years before any one knew how to take photographs; so Mr. Morse painted a great many portraits and did such good work that he received high prices for them.

Believing that the artists of America could help one another, he influenced some of them to organize the National Academy of the Arts of Design, and they elected him their first president.

When Lafayette, who had been a young officer on General Washington’s staff nearly fifty years before, came to America again as an old man, the people of America wished to have the best portrait that could be painted of the Frenchman who had helped the Americans in the War [Illustration: S. F.

B.

MORSE, INVENTOR OF THE TELEGRAPH.

] for Independence.

Finley Morse was chosen to paint this picture of General Lafayette.

While Mr. Morse was in Washington at work on this picture, he received word from his home in New Haven that his young wife had died suddenly of heart disease.

Before he could receive the letter she was buried.

People in those days traveled by stage-coach, and it took at least a week for a letter to go from Boston to Washington.

When the sorrowing father went home to arrange for the care of his three motherless children, he spoke of the slowness of sending word from place to place, and said he hoped the time would come when news could be sent long distances in an instant.

But of course he had no idea then that he would have anything to do with bringing that blessing to mankind.

When Morse was returning from one of his visits to Europe to study art, several of his friends on the ship were talking at the table about what someone had done by way of sending signals like lightning by means of electricity.

“If they can do that,” said Mr. Morse, “why could we not write letters in a second or two from New York to Charleston with it?

” The others laughed at the idea.

“Why not?

” kept ringing in Mr. Morse’s ears.

He stayed in his stateroom to study and think.

He remembered what he had learned from his professors in college about electricity.

With such materials as he could get together on shipboard, he made magnets and electrical appliances.

By the time the ship sailed up New York harbor, Mr. Morse had not only a good idea of the way to go to work to make a telegraph apparatus, but he had made up the “dot-and-dash code,” now in use in telegraphy.

The idea took such a hold on his mind that he could no longer paint pictures.

But when he talked to others about it, it all seemed impossible--“too good to be true”--and he could not find wealthy men who would lend money enough to enable him to prove that a message could be sent a long distance in a moment of time by telegraph.

While Mr. Morse was waiting and struggling to start “the electro-magnetic telegraph” he made a bare living by taking the first photographic likenesses, called daguerreotypes, in America.

After eleven years of hard work and poverty so keen that he had to go hungry sometimes, Mr. Morse’s friends in Congress passed a bill in the House to furnish him government money enough for a trial line forty miles long.

But on the last day of the session, which was to end at midnight, there were over a hundred bills ahead of his in the Senate.

Mr. Morse went home that night utterly discouraged.

In the morning Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, came to congratulate him.

His bill had been passed just before midnight and the President had signed it, giving Mr. Morse all the money he needed to show how he could “send letters by lightning.

” [Illustration: MORSE’S FIRST TELEGRAPH SOUNDER] The overjoyed inventor told Miss Ellsworth that when his line was all ready she should send the first message over it.

It was decided that the trial line should be put up between Washington and Baltimore.

It was completed before the 24th of May, 1844. One end of it was in the Capitol at Washington and the other at Baltimore.

Miss Ellsworth’s first message, flashed by S. F.

B.

Morse to his partner, Mr. Vail, in Baltimore, was this text of Scripture: “What hath God wrought!

” The first news sent out to the whole country was that of James K. Polk’s nomination at the Convention in Baltimore as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

Mr. Morse’s struggles were now over.

The telegraph became a wonderful success and he was honored by presidents, kings, and princes with medals, stars, crosses, and other decorations.

The inventor now turned his attention to running telegraph lines under water, and laid a cable under New York harbor.

About twenty years later another man, Cyrus W. Field, succeeded in connecting America with Europe by laying a cable beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

So S. F.

B.

Morse’s words were realized: “If I can make the telegraph work ten miles, I can make it go around the globe.

” He really made true these words of Puck, one of Shakespeare’s fairies: “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.

”