Samuel Morse

From 1836 Morse developed an electromagnetic recording telegraph with Leonard Gale and, from 1837, Alfred Vail. After Congress voted $30,000 in March 1843 for an experimental line, the Washington-Baltimore wire carried the message "What hath God wrought?" on 24 May 1844. The Library of Congress's account names Joseph Henry's published research, Gale's help and Vail's mechanical work as keys to the system, and in O'Reilly v. Morse (1854) the Supreme Court upheld his patent for the apparatus and process he had described while striking down his broadest claim, to any use of electromagnetism for marking characters at a distance.

Trained in London under Benjamin West and Washington Allston, Morse worked as a portrait and history painter for more than two decades. His large canvases include The House of Representatives (1821-22), with some eighty portraits of members, and Gallery of the Louvre (1831-33), in which he regrouped Old Master paintings from the Louvre in a single room. In 1826 he was a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design in New York.

After meeting Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1839, Morse published one of the earliest American descriptions of the daguerreotype. With John William Draper he opened a portrait studio in New York and taught the process to several pupils, among them Mathew Brady.

On 18 October 1842 Morse laid about two miles of wire, insulated by hand with pitch, tar and rubber, across New York Harbor from the Battery to Governor's Island. According to his son's account, the next day's public demonstration stopped after a few signals when a ship's anchor snagged the cable and the crew cut it. That December he tried sending signals across the canal in Washington, and reported to Alfred Vail that the test succeeded.

Repeating the trial in a different form within two months, rather than dropping the question of crossing water, is consistent with the profile's high experimentation score. Experimentation

Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor at the University of the City of New York, first examined Morse's apparatus in the winter of 1836 and suggested replacing its single-cell battery with one of many cells and winding the magnet with hundreds of turns of wire. In a letter written in 1856, Gale recalled that the change was tried the same day and carried the current through hundreds of feet of wire instead of a few dozen. Gale wrote this for Joseph Henry during Henry's dispute with Morse, twenty years after the event.

Taking up an outsider's correction immediately offers one example behind the profile's moderate belief-updating score; the episode also shows how much the working system drew on other people's science. Belief Updating

In 1834 Morse wrote to members of Congress asking to be chosen to paint one of the four remaining panels in the Capitol Rotunda. When the artists were named in 1837 he was not among them; he finished his last paintings that December and turned to the telegraph. In an 1849 letter he wrote that he had taken scarcely any interest in painting for many years.

Moving his working life from painting to invention after this setback sits alongside the profile's adaptability, though his need for income and the telegraph work already under way were also part of the change. Adaptability