SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE MORSE & THE TELEGRAPH PATENT

Samuel Morse

Today, The Grandma has been downloading new applications to work with her mobile phone. She has thought how important is having a mobile nowadays because it has becoming a must in our lives. The Grandma has thought in Samuel Morse, the American inventor who received the patent for the telegraph on a day like today in 1840. The telegraph was as important for old generations as mobile phone is for ours.

The Grandma wants to talk about Samuel Morse and the telegraph, one of the most important invents of the 19th century.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791-April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter.

After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs.

He was a co-developer of Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.

Samuel F. B. Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the first child of the pastor Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), who was also a geographer, and his wife Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese (1766-1828). His father was a great preacher of the Calvinist faith and supporter of the American Federalist party.

College to receive instruction in the subjects of religious philosophy, mathematics, and science of horses. While at Yale, he attended lectures on electricity from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day and was a member of the Society of Brothers in Unity. He supported himself by painting. In 1810, he graduated from Yale with Phi Beta Kappa honors.

While returning by ship from Europe in 1832, Morse encountered Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston, a man who was well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson's electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph. He set aside his painting, The Gallery of the Louvre.

More information: Time

The original Morse telegraph, submitted with his patent application, is part of the collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

In time the Morse code, which he developed, would become the primary language of telegraphy in the world. It is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.

Meanwhile, William Cooke and Professor Charles Wheatstone had learned of the Wilhelm Weber and Carl Gauss electromagnetic telegraph in 1833. They had reached the stage of launching a commercial telegraph prior to Morse, despite starting later.

In England, Cooke became fascinated by electrical telegraphy in 1836, four years after Morse. Aided by his greater financial resources, Cooke abandoned his primary subject of anatomy and built a small electrical telegraph within three weeks.

The Telegraph

Wheatstone also was experimenting with telegraphy and most importantly understood that a single large battery would not carry a telegraphic signal over long distances.

He theorized that numerous small batteries were far more successful and efficient in this task. Wheatstone was building on the primary research of Joseph Henry, an American physicist. Cooke and Wheatstone formed a partnership and patented the electrical telegraph in May 1837, and within a short time had provided the Great Western Railway with a 13-mile (21 km) stretch of telegraph. However, within a few years, Cooke and Wheatstone's multiple-wire signaling method would be overtaken by Morse's cheaper method.

Morse received a patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid, who personally tested the new invention.

He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1849. The original patent went to the Breese side of the family after the death of Samuel Morse.

In 1856, Morse went to Copenhagen and visited the Thorvaldsens Museum, where the sculptor's grave is in the inner courtyard. He was received by King Frederick VII, who decorated him with the Order of the Dannebrog for the telegraph. Morse expressed his wish to donate his Thorvaldsen portrait from 1831 in Rome to the king. The Thorvaldsen portrait today belongs to Margrethe II of Denmark.

More information: Mental Floss

The Morse telegraphic apparatus was officially adopted as the standard for European telegraphy in 1851. Only the United Kingdom with its extensive overseas empire kept the needle telegraph of Cooke and Wheatstone.

In 1858, Morse introduced wired communication to Latin America when he established a telegraph system in Puerto Rico, then a Spanish Colony.

In the United States, Morse held his telegraph patent for many years, but it was both ignored and contested.

In 1853, The Telegraph Patent case-O'Reilly v. Morse came before the U.S. Supreme Court where, after very lengthy investigation, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Morse had been the first to combine the battery, electromagnetism, the electromagnet, and the correct battery configuration into a workable practical telegraph. However, in spite of this clear ruling, Morse still received no official recognition from the United States government.

Artist's portrayal of Samuel Morse sending

The Supreme Court did not accept all of Morse's claims. The O'Reilly v. Morse case has become widely known among patent lawyers because the Supreme Court explicitly denied Morse's claim 8 for any and all use of the electromagnetic force for purposes of transmitting intelligible signals to any distance.

The Supreme Court sustained, however, Morse's claim to such telecommunication when effectuated by means of Morse's inventive repeater apparatus. This was an electrical circuit in which a cascade of many sets comprising a relay and a battery were connected in series, so that when each relay closed, it closed a circuit to cause the next battery to power the succeeding relay, as suggested in the accompanying figure.

This caused Morse's signal to pass along the cascade without degrading into noise as its amplitude decreased with the distance traveled. Each time the amplitude of the signal approaches the noise level, the repeater in effect, a nonlinear amplifier boosts the signal amplitude well above the noise level.

This use of repeaters permitted a message to be sent to great distances, which was previously not feasible.

More information: Mid-Day

The Supreme Court thus held that Morse could properly claim a patent monopoly on the system or process of transmitting signals at any distance by means of the repeater circuitry indicated above, but he could not properly claim a monopoly over any and all uses of electromagnetic force to transmit signals.

The apparatus limitation in the former type of claim limited the patent monopoly to what Morse taught and gave the world. The lack of that limitation in the latter type of claim both gave Morse more than was commensurate with what he had contributed to society and discouraged the inventive efforts of others who might come up with different and/or better ways to send signals at a distance using the electromagnetic force.

The problem that Morse faced the deterioration of the signal with distance and how he solved it is discussed in more detail in the article O'Reilly v. Morse. In summary, the solution, as the Supreme Court stated, was the repeater apparatus described in the preceding paragraphs.

The importance of this legal precedent in patent law cannot be overstated, as it became the foundation of the law governing the eligibility of computer program-implemented inventions, as well as inventions implementing natural laws, to be granted patents.

He died in New York City on April 2, 1872, and was interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

More information: The Vintage News

If the presence of electricity can be made visible

in any part of the circuit, I see no reason

why intelligence may not be transmitted

instantaneously by electricity.

Samuel Morse