This Day in History

The iPhone of its day…

It was small, it was electronic, you could hold it in the palm of your hand.

It allowed you to be connected to anyone else, anywhere in the world instantly.

It had however only 1 app – dot dot dot dash.

But as a piece of technology, it changed the world forever.

Prior to the invention of the telegraph, the fastest anyone could communicate with anyone else was as fast as a horse could ride carrying a messenger.  It had not changed since the days of the ancient Greeks.  Now, suddenly, people could communicate over vast distances instantly. Distance had ceased to exist.  The world we live in today was born today, April 27th, 1791 with the birth of Samuel FB Morse.

Morse was no Steve Jobs.

He was, perhaps, closer to Adolf Hitler.

Oy.

We don’t like to think of our technological heroes that way.  But there it is.

Morse was not an inventor by trade, at least not to start with. Neither was he a scientist. He was, in fact, a painter.  A failed painter. OK, not as much of a failure as Hitler, who ended up selling hand painted post cards on the streets of Munich.  Morse did, in fact, attend the Royal Academy in London, which is pretty good, and here is one of his paintings:

It’s pretty good. I mean, I couldn’t do it.  (I wouldn’t buy it either, but terrible it is not).
What was terrible was Morse’s politics.

He was a great defender of slavery, for example (ugh!)

In 1850, he published a treatise entitled An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery

Seriously.

He also ran for mayor of New York on a ticket that was anti-Catholic, anti-Immigration and anti just about everything else.

Charming fellow.

He came close to getting a Federal commission for his paintings, but when that fell through, he went back to England. On the ship, he began to develop an interest in the then rather esoteric field of electricity.

Morse took his sea voyage in 1832, but by 1836 he was ready to demonstrate his new invention, the electric telegraph to the public.  In 1842, Morse strung a telegraph wire between two committee rooms in Congress to demonstrate the technology and secured a government grant to expand his work. On May 1, 1844, Morse telegraphed the nomination of Henry Clay from the Whig Party convention in Baltimore to Washington, DC.  That closed the deal, and on May 24, 1844, the first permanent telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington DC was opened.  Morse keyed in the words, as everyone knows, ‘What hath God wrought”, which made for pretty good PR, although no one today uses the word ‘wrought’ in everyday conversation.

Morse and his invention certainly changed the world.  The world we inhabit today is directly derivative of his vision and his hard work.

However, a pleasant person, he very much was not.