The year was 1844 and Samuel Finley Breese Morse was about to make history. For you see Samuel Morse was about to attempt the impossible – to transmit an electronic message, by what would later be referred to as Morse code, a distance of 40 miles from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. This new technology, the telegraph, a strange looking machine with attached copper wires, was all set to once again put the Bible on display, and oh incidentally prove a turning point in the advancement of human civilization.
Morse sat before his invention and ticked of its first message: “What hath God wrought!” This message was received seconds later by Morse’s assistant in Baltimore who promptly responded, a message back to Morse, to the amazement of all who were assembled to see if the telegraph would fail or became a part of communication history. It was only fitting that the first message sent on the telegraph was from the Bible – (Numbers 23:23) since Samuel Morse was a deeply committed Christian whose purpose in life was to honor the Lord in everything he did.
Morse was a world class inventor and internationally famous portrait painter but more than anything else he considered himself a humble servant of the Lord. When asked why he was selected to bring his monumental invention of the telegraph to the world he said: “I have made a valuable application of electricity not because I was superior to other men but solely because God, who meant it for mankind, must reveal it to someone and He was pleased to reveal it to me.”
But just what motivated Morse to invent the telegraph is not so well known, but it had its beginnings in a tragic event in his life. One day in 1825, while working on a painting in Washington, D.C., Morse received a letter from his father informing him that his wife was deathly ill. Sadly, by the time Morse made it home his wife was dead and buried. Crushed, Morse was haunted by the fact that news traveled so slow in those days and as a result he wasn’t able to be with his wife during her final hours. So what did Morse do? He turned his inventive mind to the study of electricity with the hope that he could invent a way to speed up communications – the result was the invention of the electric telegraph and the first binary code – Morse code.
Educated at Yale University, Morse help found the National Academy of Design, and served as its president for 20 years. In addition he was appointed to the first chair of fine arts in America, the Professor of Sculpture and Painting at New York University. But for all of the accolades He received Morse understood that staying humble was the crowning glory of his legacy. Just four years before his death in 1872 Morse reflected back on his career and forward to his future reward when he said: “The nearer I approach to the end of my pilgrimage, the clearer is the evidence of the divine origin of the Bible, the grandeur and sublimity of God’s remedy for fallen man are more appreciated, and the future is illumined with hope and joy.”