Samuel Morse | BJU Press Summer History eCamp
Samuel Morse
Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791, not long after the Revolutionary War in America. When Samuel grew up to be a young man, his father sent him off to college at Yale University. Samuel had to find a way to make money while he was away from home, so he started painting pictures of his friends for money. He got better and better at painting portraits.
He decided to study art in Europe under the famous painter Benjamin West. While in England, he became friends with a man named William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a Christian, and he shared the testimony of his faith in God to Samuel. Deeply impacted by Wilberforce’s faith, Samuel accepted Christ as his Savior.
He began traveling back and forth between Europe and America by ship because so many people were asking him to paint their portrait. One of them was a beautiful young lady named Lucretia. He fell in love with her, and they got married soon afterward.
Samuel Morse became a very well-known painter. He was even asked to paint a portrait of the French general Lafayette, who fought for America in the Revolutionary War. Samuel felt honored to be able to paint such a great leader.
While he was working on the portrait in Washington D.C., a messenger on horse arrived to give him a letter from Samuel’s father. The message said Samuel’s wife was very sick. He left immediately to be with Lucretia, leaving the painting unfinished. But by the time he got home, she was dead.
Samuel was heartbroken. He wished he could have known sooner that his wife was sick so that he could have seen her. He wished there were a faster way to send messages than by horse or boat.
He decided to sail to Europe again to continue studying art. While he was sailing on the ship home, he met a scientist who was experimenting with an extremely powerful magnet called an electromagnet. They talked about this new discovery during the voyage home.
When Samuel returned home, he got an idea. He realized that if he stretched a wire over a long distance, he could use the electromagnet to send signals through the wire to a person on the other end.
Electricity travels from one end of a wire to the other instantly, so this invention could send messages over long distances in a moment.
He started working on the new invention. He called it a “telegraph.” He told everyone about the new invention, but most people didn’t believe it would work. So Morse traveled to America’s capital, Washington D.C., to prove to everyone that the telegraph worked. He strung a wire from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. Many people gathered in the Capitol Building on May 24, 1844 to wait for Samuel Morse to send a message from Baltimore and prove that his invention really worked.
Then the message came. Morse used a code of long and short “beeps,” which he named Morse code, to send his message: “What hath God wrought?” He chose this quotation from Numbers 23:23 because he wanted to thank God for making the telegraph possible. His invention worked!
Morse started hanging telegraph lines all across America. Now people could send telegraphs across the country so that people could find out the latest news instantly instead of waiting weeks or months for letters to be sent by mail. The telegraph made Samuel Morse quite rich, but he was not selfish with his money. He knew God had guided him while he was working on the invention. He gave much of his money away to churches and mission organizations to help spread the Gospel. Samuel Morse knew that his real treasure was not on earth, but in heaven.