The dark history of Samuel Morse

In February 1825, Samuel Morse was in Washington DC working on a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. The young artist was building a successful career from painting prominent political and society figures. But unfortunately, he was around 300 miles from his home in Connecticut, where his wife Lucretia had recently given birth to their third child.

Alerted to this happy news by letter (the swiftest form of communication at the time) Morse then received a second correspondence. But this time, the news was terrible. Lucretia had died suddenly of a heart attack. By the time he made it back home, she'd already been buried.

Although Morse never publicly discussed the link, it’s thought to be this awful incident that drove him to switch careers. Keen to stake his place in history, he became the man behind Morse code, creating instant communication across the telegraph networks of the USA – and beyond.

When I first heard this story, I found it touching, and decided to explore it further in the latest issue of IQ (the magazine for members of British Mensa, published by Think). However, it turned out there was a lot more to Morse that was far from appealing.

Despite being the descendant of a Wiltshire shoemaker, Morse was fearful of incomers, particularly Catholics, whose faith he described as a “poisonous serpent”. He twice stood unsuccessfully on an anti-immigration, anti-Catholic ticket to be Mayor of New York, and wrote vicious anti-Catholic articles under a pseudonym in the New York Observer.

He was also a supporter of slavery, publishing a lengthy paper in which he defended it as “divinely ordained for the discipline of the human race”.

And how about his achievement in ‘inventing’ Morse code? Well in truth, the innovation was largely built on the work of pioneers such as Eduard Weber, Carl Friedrich Gauss, William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone and Leonard Gale. Then there was Alfred Vail, a younger man and skilled machinist who was able to turn Morse’s crude prototypes into something with commercial potential. Yet despite investing heavily in the project, Vail was later frozen out of the profits. Morse grabbed all the glory for himself, bitterly clinging on to the credit until his death.

But nothing lasts forever. Morse died in 1872, seven years after slavery was abolished in the US. America went on to be led by two Catholic presidents (Kennedy and Biden), and the New York Observer became better known for publishing Candace Bushnell’s Sex And The City column.

Today, Morse code is rarely used by anyone other than amateur radio enthusiasts, but there’s something rather beautiful about its clarity and simplicity. You can tap it on a wall, flash it with a mirror, or blink it with your eyes. It’s communication at its purest.

And presumably, it’s that purity of communication that Morse would have liked to have been remembered for. Yet history doesn’t always work out that way.