The next stride which Progress made seemed even more wonderful. Having contrived an easier and a quicker way to move men and their belongings from one place to another, what should she do but whisper in the ear of a thinking man: “You can make thought travel many times faster.” The man whose inventive genius made it possible for men to flash their thoughts thousands of miles in a few seconds of time was Samuel Finley Breese Morse.
He was born in 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts. His father was a learned minister, who “was always thinking, always writing, always talking, always acting”; and his mother was a woman of noble character, who inspired her son with lofty purpose.
When he was seven he went to Andover, Massachusetts, to school, and still later entered Phillips Academy in the same town. At fourteen he entered Yale College, where from the first he was a good, faithful student.
S.F.B. Morse.
As his father was poor, Finley had to help himself along, and was able to do it by painting, on ivory, likenesses of his classmates and professors, for which he received from one dollar to five dollars each. In this way he made considerable money.
At the end of his college course he made painting his chosen profession and went to London, where he studied four years under Benjamin West. Though for some years he divided his time and effort between painting and invention, he at last decided to devote himself wholly to invention. This change in his life-work was the outcome of an incident which took place on a second voyage home from Europe, where he had been spending another period in study.
On the ocean steamer the conversation at dinner one day was about some experiments with electricity. One of the men present said that so far as had been learned from experiment electricity passes through any length of wire in a second of time.
“Then,” said Morse, “thought can be transmitted hundreds of miles in a moment by means of electricity; for, if electricity will go ten miles without stopping, I can make it go around the globe.”
