Up a Tree

Sharon's distant cousin, Samuel F.B. Morse, began his early adult life trying to be a professional artist, but most people know little about this phase of his life. Instead they think of him as the inventor of the telegraph.  Now there's a sense in which this invention, combined with the telephone, led us to this modern day in which we carry a device about in our hands so we need never be out of touch if we don't want to be. I may never be able to entirely forgive him for this.  Like many creative people, Morse's interests were wide, as I mentioned in the last post.. Among those interests was electricity. But a couple of events occurred in his life that caused him to take up the study of electricity in earnest -- a death and a chance encounter. As I mentioned last time, at one point Morse was an itinerant portraitist. While away from home doing one such commissioned portrait, his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, gave birth and subsequently died from compli