Samuel Morse's reversal of fortune

MORSE'S REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: The Smithsonian has this intriguing piece on the telegraph, and, more importantly, the failed artist who invented it – Samuel Morse.

Morse gave up painting entirely, relinquishing the whole career he had set his heart on since college days. No one could dissuade him.“Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me,” he would write bitterly to [his devoted friend, James Fenimore] Cooper. “I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.” He must attend to one thing at a time, as his father had long ago advised him. The “one thing” henceforth would be his telegraph, the crude apparatus housed in his New York University studio apartment. Later it would be surmised that, had Morse not stopped painting when he did, no successful electromagnetic telegraph would have happened when it did, or at least not a Morse electromagnetic telegraph.

Essential to his idea, as he had set forth earlier in notes written in 1832, were that signals would be sent by the opening and closing of an electrical circuit, that the receiving apparatus would, by electromagnet, record signals as dots and dashes on paper, and that there would be a code whereby the dots and dashes would be translated into numbers and letters.

The apparatus he had devised was an almost ludicrous-looking assembly of wooden clock wheels, wooden drums, levers, cranks, paper rolled on cylinders, a triangular wooden pendulum, an electromagnet, a battery, a variety of copper wires and a wooden frame of the kind used to stretch canvas for paintings (and for which he had no more use). The contraption was “so rude,” Morse wrote, so like some child’s wild invention, that he was reluctant to have it seen.

Although his transformation could hardly be described as accidental, it surely must be noted that had Morse succeeded as an artist, it is unlikely that he would have perused his invention as a project of any significance. Just as a matter of interest, you should know that when I say 'failed artist', that doesn't necessarily mean bad artist, of which Morse was certainly not one. He had talent, and this piece alone illustrates it. Read the rest.