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SCULPTURE OF THE MONTH #8

(Mystery Sculpture #1)

SAMUEL FINLEY BREESE MORSE

Artist: Byron M. Pickett
 

Dedicated: 1870
 

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Location, size, medium                                                                        Back to top

Bronze statue (8 feet), granite pedestal (6.5 feet). Just inside Central Park at 72nd Street (near Fifth Avenue). It faces north but is surrounded by trees: best viewed at mid-day or later, and after the leaves have fallen.

About the statue and the subject                                                          Back to top

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) was among the most prominent nineteenth-century American painters, but like many an artist, he found painting financially unprofitable. Perhaps for that reason he began to experiment with the telegraph while teaching painting and sculpture at New York University in the 1830s.

Working with two more technically knowledgeable colleagues, Morse succeeded in reducing the number of wires in a telegraph to one, and in developing a code that allowed easy transmission while permitting trained operators to "hear" messages as they were being transmitted, rather than waiting for a print-out. While Morse is sometimes presented as a dilettante dabbling in science, no dilettante could have focused on the telegraph for the decades it took Morse to develop his code, construct a successful line and eventually turn a profit.

"The telegraph was something very new under the sun, something that would have been utterly inconceivable to the [eighteenth-century] world .... The telegraph could transmit information at very high speed--thousands of times faster than it could be physically carried and hundreds of times faster than Chappe's visual telegraph could transmit it--and at very low cost. So it is not surprising that once its practicality was demonstrated, the telegraph spread with astonishing speed, often using the convenient pathways forged by the equally fast-spreading railroads." (Gordon, p. 9)

Morse made hundreds of thousands of dollars from licensing the use of the telegraph. By 1854, 23,000 miles of telegraph wires stretched across the United States. One of the notable effects was to make New York's Wall Street the financial center of the United States, because it ensured that New York's stock prices could be transmitted almost instantaneously to other markets in the country. (See Gordon, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power 1653-2000, p. 203.)

Morse was also a pioneer photographer who learned the technique in the 1840s from Louis Daguerre, inventor of the earliest widely used photographic process--the "daguerreotype." Morse's pupils included renowned Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.

Further reading

The American National Biography, available online through most major libraries, offers a scholarly biography of Morse and an annotated bibliography.

John Steele Gordon’s A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic  Story of the Transatlantic Cable describes the radical changes brought by the telegraph and the laying of the first transatlantic cable in 1866--the engineering feat of the century and one of the most expensive business projects ever attempted.

Eric Daniels’ The Inventive Age in American History is engagingly presented, informative and inspiring. He devotes about half an hour to Morse, and also covers Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson, Nikola Tesla, Charles Franklin Kettering and the Wright brothers. Available through the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

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