The Probert Encyclopaedia of People

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 travelled to England to study art with Allston and Benjamin West, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1813. 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. Interested in science, he experimented with the phenomena of electricity and invented the morse code in 1832 as a by-product of his invention of communications by electric telegraphy and conceived the idea of a recording magnetic telegraph.
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