Samuel+Morse

Communication Telegraph People in Communication Morse Code Deafness

 Samuel Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American artist and inventor. He was born in 1791 and died in 1872. Educated at Yale, in 1810 he traveled to England to study art. In 1815 he returned to New York and settled as a portrait painter. In 1826 he was appointed the first president of the national academy of design.

Samuel Morse, had high hopes of becoming a great artist. However, interested in science, he experimented with the phenomena of electricity and invented the telegraph and Morse code in 1832. He then received a patent for the machine. He needed an investor to help start the business. This investor was Amos Kendall. The telegraph business skyrocketed, making a lot of money for Kendall.

Morse sent the first public telegram on May 24, 1844. The message, "What hath God wrought!" was sent from the Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol at Washington over a 40-mile wire to Baltimore, Maryland.



IN 1848 Morse married his second cousin, a deaf woman, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold. A former student of the New York School for the Deaf, Griswold was twenty-six. Morse was fifty-seven. Griswold’s “beauty,” “artlessness,” and “amiable deportment” impressed Morse, but her deafness attracted him as well. In a letter from Morse to his brother, he said that Griswold’s “misfortune of not hearing, and her defective speech. . . excited the more my love & pity for her”. That was not all. Morse believed that the young woman’s deafness would

make her dependent on him, ensuring that he could be “doubly & trebly sure” of “her sincere devoted affection”.

There is famous story about his deaf wife helping him invent Morse code. Griswold was his second wife, not his first wife who died in 1825. Morse code was made public in 1944, four years before his marriage to Griswold. However Griswold did use Morse Code for communication. There is another incredible true connection to Deaf history. Kendall, Morses' investor for the telegraph business, is the same Kendall related to Gallaudet University. From the money he made from the telegraph, he invested the money in land where Gallaudet is currently located. Kendall later became the co-founded Gallaudet University.

Who knows? If Morse was a successful artist, there may be no Gallaudet University, but a different college for the deaf in a different location.