Samuel Morse: Dots and Dashes

In February 1825, Samuel Morse was in Washington, painting the Marquis de Lafayette, when a letter finally reached him from home. His wife Lucretia was dead — had been dead for days, and was already buried. The news had traveled from Connecticut no faster than a horse could carry it, and Morse rode home carrying a lesson he never put down: the people we love can vanish while the word of it is still on the road.

Seven years later, aboard the packet ship Sully, a dinner-table conversation about electricity lit the fuse. Before the voyage ended, Morse had sketched a machine that could send intelligence instantly over a wire and record it at the far end. What followed was eleven years of poverty, ridicule, and refusal — a professor cooking his own meals beside his coils of wire, a Congress that joked about funding mesmerism while his bill hung by a thread — until, on the last night of the session in 1843, the Senate voted him thirty thousand dollars. On May 24, 1844, his line from Washington to Baltimore clicked out four words taken from the Book of Numbers: What hath God wrought.

Samuel Morse: Dots and Dashes is the whole life — the minister's son who became America's most ambitious painter and founded its National Academy of Design; the widower, the dreamer, and the relentless promoter; the partners and rivals — Alfred Vail, Joseph Henry, Ezra Cornell — and the wire wars that made and nearly broke him; the Atlantic cable, the telegraph's Civil War, and the patriarch honored by the nations of Europe. The disputed stories are told with both sides in view, and the shameful ones plainly. From the Bedtime Biographies library of more than one hundred full-length lives.