Samuel Morse

noun

United States portrait painter who patented the telegraph and developed the Morse code (1791-1872)

• Syn: ↑Morse, ↑Samuel F. B. Morse, ↑Samuel Finley Breese Morse

• Instance Hypernyms: ↑inventor, ↑discoverer, ↑artificer, ↑painter

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Samuel Morse [Samuel Morse]

(1791–1872) an American who invented the ↑telegraph (= a device for sending messages on electric wires) and Morse code, a special ‘alphabet’ in which letters are represented by a series of short and long radio signals or flashes of light (dots and dashes). His first public message, sent in Morse code from ↑Baltimore to ↑Washington, DC, on 24 May 1844, was ‘What hath God wrought!’ His inventions were important to communication during the ↑American Civil War.