Samuel Morse

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872) was an American painter and inventor who developed the electric telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s with Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale. Morse code is named after him, though Vail did much of the work of turning it into an alphabet. The first public telegraph message, "What hath God wrought", was sent on 24 May 1844.

Quick facts

From painter to inventor

Morse studied at Yale College, graduating in 1810, and then at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He made his living as a painter and in 1826 helped found the National Academy of Design in New York, serving as its first president. In 1832 he became a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York, now New York University.

The idea of a telegraph came on the voyage home from Europe that year. On board, he talked with a fellow passenger about electromagnets and began to think of sending messages along a single wire. He put his painting career aside to pursue it.

Morse, Vail and Gale

Morse could not make the telegraph work alone.

• Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor at the same university, helped solve the problem of the signal fading along a long wire. With relays added at intervals, a message could travel about ten miles.
• Alfred Vail joined soon after, bringing practical skill and money. Vail extended the original code to cover letters and special characters in 1840.

Morse's first plan sent only numbers, which the receiver looked up in a codebook. The system of dots and dashes for each letter, used with the telegraph, is what became known as American Morse code. Historians still debate how much was Morse's work and how much was Vail's, but the name stayed with Morse.

According to a widely repeated account, Vail worked out the lengths of the letter codes by counting the pieces of type in a printer's type cases in Morristown, New Jersey, so that the most common letters got the shortest codes. That is why E, the most common letter in English, is a single dot.

The first messages

• 11 January 1838: a public demonstration at the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey. The message was “A patient waiter is no loser”.
• 1843: Congress paid $30,000 for an experimental line.
• 24 May 1844: the line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, 38 miles (61 km) long beside the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, opened. The first message, “What hath God wrought”, was sent from the Capitol to Baltimore. Annie Ellsworth chose the words.

You can translate that famous message in the Morse code translator and hear it.

American Morse code and International Morse code

The code Morse and Vail used differed from the one used today.

• American Morse code (also called Railroad Morse) used dots, dashes and different lengths of space inside letters. It was used on North American telegraph lines.
• International Morse code was developed by Friedrich Clemens Gerke, whose 1848 “Hamburg alphabet” was first used on a telegraph line between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany. Gerke removed the varying spaces and dash lengths so that only dots and dashes were left. Only four letters kept their original patterns: E, H, K and N (K and N with longer dashes). The digits were completely revised.
• Gerke's code was adopted in Germany and Austria in 1851, and the International Telegraph Convention standardised it in Paris on 17 May 1865. The current standard is ITU-R M.1677-1.

That is why the translator on this site, and every modern Morse code tool, uses International Morse. Our translator does not convert to American Morse, so a search for an “American Morse code translator” will not find a match here. To read old American Morse, you need a chart that includes its spaced letters.

Telegraph code translators

Early telegraph operators read the code by ear from a clicking device called a sounder, and later by paper tape. A modern translator turns text into the same dots and dashes. To hear the original rhythm, try the sound generator or the translator on the home page, and for a look at how the code is still used today read what is Morse code.

What happened to Morse code

• 1999: Morse code stopped being the international standard for maritime distress when the satellite-based GMDSS replaced it. The last commercial Morse code transmission in the United States was on 12 July 1999 and ended with SK.
• Amateur radio: Morse (called CW) is still popular. The ITU made Morse proficiency optional for amateur licences in 2003.
• Aviation: radio navigation beacons broadcast their identifiers in Morse code.
• Accessibility: Morse code can be used as an input method for people with limited movement. Android 5.0 and later support Morse code text input.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Samuel Morse and Morse code on Wikipedia; ITU-R M.1677-1.

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