Samuel Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born April 27, 1791, and spent his early career as a portrait painter, building a solid reputation on canvas. In middle age he pivoted hard: working from European telegraph designs, he developed a single-wire system that made long-distance communication suddenly practical. In 1837 he co-developed the code that would bear his name, a sequence of dots and dashes that turned letters into electrical pulses. He then pushed the telegraph into commercial viability, watching it spread across continents. He died April 2, 1872, having lived long enough to see wires stitch the world together.