A few of you may be familiar with the famous phrase above...transmitted May 24, 1843 from Samuel Morse at the Supreme Court in Washington DC to his young associate Alfred Vail located at the B&O depot in Baltimore.
I chose to feature Morse first in my mini series of great American innovators because his story is both interesting, inspiring and in many ways typical of the meandering path and persistence associated with major innovation. It's also germane that he was an important innovator specifically in the field of communication, effectively creating the central nervous system for communications around the country and world.
One of the more interesting elements of the Morse story is that his initial career was in the arts. He grew up the son of a popular Congregationalist minister. By the time he was in his early thirties he was a famous American painter. He even founded the National Academy of Design in New York.
It was tragedy, however, that compelled him to begin experimenting with electricity, magnets, wiring and such in order to transmit messages in real time across vast distances. The tragic event happened while Morse was in DC painting President John Quincy Adams. He had left his wife back in New York as she was recovering from the birth their third child. His father sent word that she was "convalescent." This turned out not to be the case. She had passed away. By the time he received word and traveled through harsh conditions, she was already buried.
Morse focused his personal pain toward a solution. For the next several decades he turned from art to mechanical sciences. Interestingly very little of what ultimately became the first Morse Telegraph was the result of original discoveries. He relied on help from the likes of Joseph Henry and Leonard Gale. The key to the success of Morse is that he persevered toward his practical objective...to erase the divide of space and time so that communications could be virtually instantaneous.
Before he died, Morse was able to relish in the fact that there were over 250,000 miles of telegraph wires in the United States and over 100,000 linking the continents.
Health Care in the US and across the world has benefited from modern connectivity and communications infrastructure. However, there are still major advances yet to come and we can look to Samuel Morse for inspiration as we push onward.
