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Samuel F. B. born in Charlestown, Massachusetts to Jedidiah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese.
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Andover, Massachusetts
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At the age of 14 Samuel is admitted to Yale College, where he learns about electricity from lectures from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day.
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Samuel graduates from Yale and returns to his hometown Charlestown, Massachusetts. Despite his wishes to become a painter, Samuel's parents planned for him to apprentice a bookseller in Boston.
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In July, Samuel's parents allowed him to further his artistic career by allowing him to sail to England to study art under the American painter Benjamin West.
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Morse's plaster statuette of the Dying Hercules wins him a gold medal at the Adelphi Society of Arts exhibition in London.
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In search of portrait commissions to support himself, Samuel moves to New Hampshire.
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Samuel and his brother patent a flexible piston man-powered water pump for fire engines, although they demonstrate its abilities successfully the product is a commercial failure.
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Lucia Pickering Walker and Morse marry in Concord, New Hampshire.
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At the age of 25, Lucretia Morse dies in New Hampshire.
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In New York, Morse helps to establish the National Academy of Design, and becomes its first president.
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On a ship sailing back to New York, Samuel begins sketching prototypes and begins to develop Morse code. This same year he is appointed as professor of painting and sculpting in NYU
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After years of contemplating the idea of a telegraph and its mechanics, Samuel creates a working telegraph and files a patent for it.
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After showing the telegraph to Congress, Morse is soon given a contract for 30,000 dollars to build a fifty-mile telegraph line.
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In Paris, Samuel meets Louis Daguerre and is taught about the Daguerreotype.
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Congress votes to appropriate $30,000 for an experimental telegraph line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. Construction of the telegraph line begins several months later.
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The telegraph line is extended from Baltimore to Philadelphia. New York is now connected to Washington, D.C., Boston, and Buffalo.
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A submarine telegraph cable is successfully laid across the English Channel; direct London to Paris communications begin.
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The first transatlantic cable message is sent from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan.
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Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line to California.
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Samuel Morse dies in New York City at eighty-one years of age. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.