Samuel Morse

1791 - Born on the 27th of April in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

1810 - He graduated from Yale University.

1811 - He diligently worked on perfecting painting techniques under the careful eye of Allston.

1815 - He left the United States on August, and began his full time career as an American painter.

1815-1825 - Mark significant growth in his paintings as he sought to capture the true essence of America’s culture and life.

1816 - He had the honor of painting former Federalist President John Adams.

1817 - Was able to paint Judge Woodward  who was involved in bringing the Dartmouth case before the Supreme Court and the college’s president, Francis Brown.

1819-1821 - He experienced a great change in his life, commissions ceased as Charleston was hit with an economic recession that hit the city of Charleston hard.

1819 - Married first, Lucretia Pickering Walker on the 29th of September, in Concord, New Hampshire.

1825 - Lucretia died on 7th February, shortly after the birth of their third child.

1830-1832 - He was in Europe for three years improving his painting skills, travelling in Italy, Switzerland and France

1832 - he became one of several people interested in finding ways of communicating by sending electrical impulses across a wire -- a concept which became known as the telegraph.

1836 - He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York under the nativist (anti-immigration) banner

1837 - Morse developed a dot-and-dash alphabet and devised a practical plan for using telegraphy to communicated across great distances. Morse demonstrated a working model.

1939 - Published (from Paris) the first American description of daguerreotype photography by Louis Daguerre.

1842 - Made one last desperate trip to Washington, D.C. in December, stringing "wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol.

1843 - He had secured government funding to run a line from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington, D.C. On May 24, 1844 he transmitted the first telegraph message: "What hath God wrought!" Although he spent years in litigation over telegraph patents, he was eventually rewarded for his efforts and was a wealthy man in his later years.

      -He later experimented with submarine cable telegraphy. Both Morse and

John Draper were instrumental in introducing the daguerreotype in the United States.

1848 - He married second, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold on the 10th of August in Utica, New York.

1858 - He was awarded the sum of 400,000 French francs (equivalent to about $80,000 at the time) by the governments of France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany and Turkey, each of which contributed a share according to the number of Morse instruments in use in each country".

1861 - He was generous in his philanthropies and was one of the founders of Vassar College.

1872 - He died on the 2nd of April at his home at 5 West 22nd Street, New York, New York, at the age of eighty, and was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York