Inventor Samuel F. B. Morse is remembered for having invented Morse code and the single-wire telegraph system used to connect cities across America and around the globe. But his first career was as an artist and teacher.
Morse was a successful portrait artist, having painted the portraits of prominent Americans including Presidents and other inventors. On a visit to Paris in 1839 he met French artist and inventor (amazing how inventive these artists were!) Louis Daguerre. Daguerre had just developed a new photographic process, the first to make photography accessible to the pubic. While we would consider the process laborious, it was a momentous technological breakthrough.
As a portrait artist, Morse recognized the value in Daguerre’s innovation, learned it for himself and returned to the U. S. to begin teaching it to other artists and entrepreneurs. One of his first students was Mathew Brady, famous for his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and for his pictorial documentation of the American Civil War.
Much less expensive and much faster than having a portrait painted, it soon became fashionable for people to ‘have a picture made.’ The process was also portable and traveling photographers spread across the country making family portraits, photographing American towns and cities, and documenting events. American’s love affair with the photograph was born and Samuel Morse can be credited with helping to make that happen.
