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Before phones, computers, and telegraphs were invented, messages would take months or even years to reach. Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in April 1791, not knowing that he would be a famous inventor.
Since the age of four, Morse had been interested in drawing. When he was four, Samuel etched his teacher's face on a chest of drawers. When he was fourteen, he earned pocket money by drawing pictures of his friends and people in the town.
One day, he wrote a letter to his parents from his college saying that he was made to be a painter. Mr. and Mrs. Morse were afraid that he couldn't make a living as a painter, so they made him be a bookseller. He worked as a bookseller but at night he would paint. Finally his parents realized how he loved art so they found the money for Morse to study art in London.
When Samuel Morse went to Royal Academy in London, his teacher kept telling him that he didn't finish his work. He had about twenty unfinished paintings but he didn't have a single finished painting. Morse kept doing this till his teacher told him what he did wrong. In class, he made a model of Hercules in clay. His professor liked it so much that he asked him to enter it in a contest. It won a gold medal. So Samuel Morse had finally found something that he was good at. He began to paint portraits of people in Europe.
In 1818, he married. His wife had two boys and one girl. Life wasn't very easy. Not everyone would give Morse money for painting portraits of them so he was almost broke. In 1825, his wife died of heart trouble. He didn't even hear what happened to her and when he did, he was so sad that he almost gave up painting.
After that, Samuel and some other painters formed the National Academy and served as the first president of it. He worked from seven to midnight, painting. Four murals were supposed to be painted in a round room in the U.S Capitol. Only four artists would be chosen and he wanted to be one of them. Finally he left with his kids and his wife's sister to paint in Europe again.
On October 1832, Samuel Morse and his family, sailed back home on a ship called the Sully. One day during his trip, he heard some passengers talking about electricity. An electromagnet, which can be as simple as wire wound around a nail and attached to a battery, produces an electric current, or jolt. Suddenly, Samuel had an idea. Maybe electricity could transmit messages. For the rest of the trip, he worked on an alphabetical system that was later called Morse code. The only symbols that he made up were a dash and a dot. Common letters had short codes and not so common letters had longer codes. This is the same thing for numbers. For example: the code for s is … (three dots) and the code for w is . - - (one dot and two dashes.)
After Morse came home, he started building what he called a telegraph. It was mostly made out of picture frames, lead, and wood from a table. It was easy to make but no one cared for his invention for twelve, long years, with many problems one the way. His biggest problem was that he was broke. He also became a professor of painting and sculpture. Samuel Morse was so poor that his students gave him food and he had to sleep in the classroom. He found out one day, that he wasn't chosen to paint the murals. That's when Morse's art career came to a halt and he wanted to work on the telegraph.
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