Samuel Morse

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the message What hath God wrought from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington, D.C. The message was successfully transmitted via his telegraph wire to a railroad depot in Baltimore, Maryland.

While Morse gets the primary historical credit, he co-developed the telegraph system with physicist Joseph Henry and mechanical engineer Alfred Vail. Vail, in particular, was heavily responsible for improving the mechanics of the telegraph key and expanding the signaling code.

Before turning his attention to communications technology, Morse was a highly accomplished professional painter. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and painted prominent portraits and historical scenes.

While Morse conceptualized the single-wire telegraph, the famous dot-and-dash Morse code was heavily refined by his partner Alfred Vail. The original system used numbers, which had to be translated using a codebook, but Vail helped develop the letter-based system used today.