In 1837 Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1882) was granted a patent for a system of electrical telegraphic transmission which was to become world dominant until the end of the Second World War.

Morse was a son of the famous geographer Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826), professor of painting at University of the City of New York, a wealthy Republican patrician, and a friend of James Fenimore Cooper. He was fascinated by electricity from an early age and interested in the problem of telegraphic transmission which exercised many minds in the early nineteenth century when the increasing understanding of electricity held out the possibility of solving the problem of rapid communication of important messages. Inventors sought to apply electricity to improve on the semaphore transmission invented by the French

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Citation: Clark, Robert. "Telegraph: Samuel Morse granted patent". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 June 2005; last revised 06 January 2006. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1576, accessed 23 November 2024.]