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1. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter of portraits and historic scenes.

Samuel F. B. Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the first child of geographer and pastor Jedidiah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Breese Morse. After attending Phillips Academy as a child, he started attending college at 14. He devoted himself to art and became a pupil of Washington Allston, a well-known American painter. While at Yale University, he attended lectures on electricity from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day. He earned money by painting portraits. In 1810, he graduated from Yale University.

2. Morse invented a marble-cutting machine that could carve three dimensional sculptures in marble or stone. Morse couldn't patent it, however, because of an existing 1820 Thomas Blanchard’s design. In 1823, Morse opened an art studio in New York City. In 1825, Morse painted Marquis de Lafayette's portrait.

3. In 1837, Morse invented the electrical telegraph, based on Hans Christian Orsted's discovery in 1820 of the relationship between electricity and magnetism. In 1832, Morse developed the idea of electromagnetic telegraphy and in the fall of 1835, he built and demonstrated a recording telegraph with a moving paper ribbon.

In 1836, Morse finished his first working prototype of the telegraph. It used a one-element battery and a simple electromagnet. This prototype worked only over short distances of about 40ft or less.

4. Morse showed his prototype to Leonard Gale, professor of chemistry at New York University, where Morse taught painting. Gale was aware of the works of Joseph Henry on electromagnetic relays. Based on this knowledge Gale suggested several improvements and also urged Morse to read Henry's 1831 paper, which described these improvements. With these improvements Morse and Gale were able to record messages through ten miles of wire. In September of the same year, Alfred Vail, then student at New York University, witnessed a demonstration of the telegraph.

In 1838, Morse changed the telegraphic cipher, from a telegraphic dictionary with number code to a code for each letter.

5. On February 8, 1838, Morse first publicly demonstrated the electrical telegraph to a scientific committee at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On February 21, Morse demonstrated the telegraph to President Martin Van Buren and his cabinet.

He died in 1872 at his home in New York at the age of eighty, and was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.