Samuel Morse and his side project: The telegraph

Samuel F.B. Morse transformed human communication while pursuing an unrequited artistic dream. His telegraph—conceived amid personal tragedy and developed between canvas stretchers—collapsed distance and time, creating the foundation for our connected world. This struggling painter's side project would become his legacy, leaving his true passion relegated to museum walls while his invention changed civilization.

Morse pursued painting with single-minded determination despite decades of financial hardship. Trained in London, he returned to America in 1815 with grand artistic ambitions that repeatedly crashed against commercial realities.

"I have devoted myself to the pursuit of fame in my profession," Morse wrote to his parents, even as his massive 7-by-11-foot canvas of the House of Representatives failed commercially, forcing him into itinerant portrait painting. Undeterred, he traveled to Paris in 1831 to create his masterwork Gallery of the Louvre, meticulously depicting dozens of masterpieces on a single canvas—a project demonstrating both technical brilliance and dogged persistence.

By 1834, with Gallery of the Louvre selling for only $1,300—half his asking price and around $48,000 today—Morse reluctantly accepted a poorly paid faculty position at the University of the City of New York (now NYU), becoming America's first professor of art. His financial situation remained so precarious that he often slept in his university studio, taking whatever commissions he could find while sinking deeper into debt. After losing a bid to paint a Capitol Rotunda mural in 1837, artistic recognition seemed permanently beyond reach.

The seeds of Morse's invention sprouted from personal tragedy. In 1825, while painting in Washington, he received word of his wife Lucretia's illness only after she had already been buried. "Had I learned of her illness sooner," he later reflected, "I might have made it back in time." This wound never fully healed.

In 1832, while returning from Europe aboard the Sully, Morse engaged with Dr. Charles Thomas Jackson about recent advances in electromagnetism. By voyage's end, he had sketched the basic principles of an electric telegraph in his notebook. Using materials from his artistic trade—canvas stretchers, clockwork gears, and homemade electromagnets—he built a crude prototype by 1835 that worked over short distances (likely no more than 40 feet).

Lacking electrical expertise, Morse partnered with NYU chemistry professor Leonard Gale, who helped incorporate relays to boost the signal's range to ten miles by 1837. For the next five years, Morse demonstrated his device to skeptical investors and officials, traveling tirelessly between New York and Washington until finally securing $30,000 from Congress in 1843 to build a 38-mile test line.

On May 24, 1844, Morse transmitted "What hath God wrought!" from the Supreme Court chamber to Baltimore, instantly proving the telegraph's world-changing potential. The audience watched in stunned silence as the message returned, the implications dawning on them: distance had been conquered.

Morse developed his transformational technology while maintaining both his teaching career and artistic pursuits, converting his artist's studio into an inventor's workshop each evening. Without formal engineering training, he repurposed materials from his artistic life—using the very tools that failed to bring him fame to create something entirely new.

His university colleagues noted his peculiar habits, working late into the night with wires and magnets spread across his easels. Professor John Draper recalled, "He would arrive to lectures bleary-eyed but animated when discussing electromagnetism, showing more passion for his contraption than for the canvases he was commissioned to teach."

The financial pressure never relented. To save money and maximize work time, Morse often slept beside his prototypes, sacrificing comfort for progress. His son Sidney later wrote, "Father's dedication bordered on obsession. We would visit him at the university to find him surrounded by coils and batteries, having forgotten to eat all day."

The telegraph rapidly expanded after Morse's demonstration. By 1846, major American cities were connected by telegraph lines. After years of legal battles, Morse finally secured his patent rights in 1854, gaining international recognition and financial security that had eluded him as an artist.

His Morse Code—the familiar dots and dashes—became the global standard for telecommunications for over a century. By 1866, a transatlantic cable enabled near-instant communication across oceans, transforming journalism, commerce, and warfare. Abraham Lincoln directed Union armies in real-time during the Civil War using Morse's invention.

The struggling painter who once slept in his studio became wealthy and world-renowned—not for his art, but for a side project born of personal tragedy. Historian Kenneth Silverman aptly noted, "His paintings hang in museums, but his greatest canvas was the blank space he filled between distant cities, allowing humanity to converse across vast distances for the first time."

In his final years, Morse found peace in this unexpected legacy. "Art I have loved," he confessed in an 1865 interview, "but the telegraph came to me as a duty to mankind." Perhaps the most striking irony: the man who spent decades seeking artistic immortality achieved it instead through an invention created in the margins of his true passion.