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Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born April 27, 1791
Charlestown, Massachusetts -
The first child of the pastor Jedidiah Morse who was also a geographer and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese .
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Samuel Morse enters Yale College at age fourteen. He hears lectures on electricity from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. While at Yale, he earns money by painting small portraits of friends, classmates, and teachers.
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Samuel Morse graduated from Yale College and returns to Charlestown, Massachusetts. Despite his wishes to be a painter and encouragement from the famed American painter Washington Allston, Morse's parents plan for him to be a bookseller's apprentice. He becomes a clerk for Daniel Mallory, his father's Boston book publisher.
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In July, Morse's parents relent and let him set sail for England with Washington Allston. He attends the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
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In October, Samuel Morse returns to the United States and Morse opens an art studio in Boston.
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On September 29, Lucretia Pickering Walker and Morse are married in Concord, New Hampshire.
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January in New York, Samuel Morse becomes a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design, which has been established in reaction to the conservative American Academy of Fine Arts. Morse is president on and off for nineteen years.
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On June 9, his father, Jedidiah Morse, dies.
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His mother, Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese Morse, dies.
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The American scientist Joseph Henry announces his discovery of a powerful electromagnet made from many layers of insulated wire. Demonstrating how such a magnet can send electric signals over long distances, he suggests the possibility of the telegraph.
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In Autumn, Samuel Morse constructs a recording telegraph with a moving paper ribbon and demonstrates it to several friends and acquaintances.
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By November, a message can be sent through ten miles of wire arranged on reels in Dr. Gale's university lecture room. In September, Alfred Vail, an acquaintance of Morse, witnesses a demonstration of the telegraph. He is soon taken on as a partner with Morse and Gale because of his financial resources, mechanical skills, and access to his family's iron works for building telegraph models.
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Dr. Charles T. Jackson, Morse's acquaintance from the 1832 Sully voyage, now claims to be the inventor of the telegraph.
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Samuel Morse is granted a United States patent for his telegraph. Morse opens a daguerreotype portrait studio in New York with John William Draper.
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Morse serves as a United States commissioner at the Paris Universal Exposition.
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On June 10, a statue of Morse is unveiled in Central Park in New York City. With much fanfare, Morse sends a "farewell" telegraph message around the world from New York.
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On April 2, Samuel Morse dies in New York City at eighty-one years of age. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
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samuls invention allowed communication over distances for human beings without him we would not have the telephone.
