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70 free Samuel Morse trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Samuel Morse trivia quiz covers both halves of an unusual life: the first forty years, in which Morse was one of America's leading portrait painters, and the second, in which he became the namesake of the telegraph code still used by radio amateurs today. The early questions deal with his Yale education, his years at the Royal Academy in London, his portraits of Monroe and Lafayette, the National Academy of Design he helped found, and his encounter with Daguerre and photography. The middle of the quiz follows the telegraph from a shipboard conversation in 1832 through the relay breakthrough with Leonard Gale, the partnership with Alfred Vail, the first demonstration at Speedwell Ironworks, the $30,000 congressional grant, and the famous 'What hath God wrought' message of 24 May 1844. It then turns to the patent fights, the Supreme Court case O'Reilly v. Morse, the European honors, the transatlantic cable and Morse's unattractive politics. The final questions are about the code itself: how Vail worked out letter frequencies, Friedrich Gerke's revisions, the 1865 international standard, SOS, speed records, the last commercial transmissions and the end of the Morse test for radio licences. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Samuel Morse and Morse code.
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Q 01In which Massachusetts town was Samuel Morse born in 1791?
Charlestown
His first American ancestor, Anthony Morse, had emigrated from Wiltshire in 1635 and settled in Newbury, Massachusetts.
Q 02Morse's father Jedidiah was a Calvinist pastor and also a noted what?
Geographer
Jedidiah Morse was a great preacher of the Calvinist faith and a supporter of the Federalist Party, and he tried hard to pass both on to his eldest son.
Q 03From which college did Morse graduate with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1810?
Yale
He attended lectures on electricity there from Benjamin Silliman and Jeremiah Day, and supported himself by painting.
Q 04Which school did Morse attend before college?
Phillips Academy, Andover
At college he studied religious philosophy, mathematics and science and belonged to the Society of Brothers in Unity.
Q 05Which American artist took Morse to England in 1811 to study painting?
Washington Allston
Allston had been impressed by Morse's Landing of the Pilgrims and arranged with Morse's father a three-year stay to study under Benjamin West.
Q 06Which institution admitted Morse by the end of 1811, where he studied Michelangelo and Raphael?
The Royal Academy
He remained in England through the War of 1812, and his letters home grew increasingly anti-Federalist as the war dragged on.
Q 07What was the title of the masterpiece Morse painted in England after mastering life drawing?
Dying Hercules
He first made a sculpture as a study for the painting; his Judgment of Jupiter, also painted in England, is read by critics as a moral lesson on infidelity.
Q 08A blue plaque marks Morse's London home from 1812 to 1815. Where is it?
Cleveland Street
He left England on August 21, 1815, to begin his full-time career as a painter in the United States.
Q 09Which sitting president did Morse paint in 1820?
James Monroe
He had painted the Federalist former president John Adams four years earlier; the Panic of 1819 had cut into his commissions.
Q 10Morse's ambitious 1821 painting depicted which body at work by lamplight at night?
The House of Representatives
He placed eighty individuals inside the new Capitol chamber, but the picture failed to draw a crowd when exhibited in New York in 1823.
Q 11Which French supporter of the American Revolution did Morse paint in a grand 1825 portrait?
Marquis de Lafayette
He posed the general against a sunset beside busts of Franklin and Washington, with a third pedestal apparently reserved for the sitter himself.
Q 12Which New York institution did Morse help found in 1826 and lead as president until 1845?
The National Academy of Design
Forty-nine of his paintings were exhibited there, and he served a second term as president in 1861–62.
Q 13Morse's giant Paris canvas crammed 38 miniature masterpieces from which museum?
The Louvre
Q 21With Leonard Gale's relays, Morse could soon send a message through how much wire?
10 miles
Before that his signal died after a few hundred yards; Gale was a personal friend of the physicist Joseph Henry.
Q 22Which skilled, well-off young man joined Morse and Gale and did much of the work on the code?
Alfred Vail
Vail also played an important role in developing the code, and some historians argue the alphabet as we know it is really his.
Q 23In which New Jersey town was the telegraph first publicly demonstrated, at the Speedwell Ironworks on January 11, 1838?
Morristown
Two miles of wire had been threaded through a nearby factory house so a local crowd could watch a message travel that distance.
He set the picture aside on the voyage home in 1832 when the idea of the telegraph seized him, and finished it back in the United States.
Q 14With which American novelist did Morse become friends while in Paris around 1830?
James Fenimore Cooper
Morse spent 1830 to 1832 travelling in Italy, Switzerland and France to improve his painting.
Q 15In 1832 Morse became America's first professor of painting and sculpture at the institution now known as what?
New York University
The post was at the University of the City of New York, and his will later endowed a physics medal awarded there every year.
Q 16Which pioneer of photography did Morse meet in Paris in 1839?
Louis Daguerre
Morse's letter to the New York Observer describing the daguerreotype was reprinted widely and gave America its first broad awareness of photography.
Q 17Which famous Civil War photographer initially studied under Morse?
Mathew Brady
Brady later took photographs of his old teacher.
Q 18Morse's estate at Poughkeepsie, New York, where some of his art is displayed, is called what?
Locust Grove
He also bought land at what became Morsemere in Ridgefield, New Jersey, but died before the house there was completed.
Q 19Whose shipboard experiments with an electromagnet in 1832 gave Morse the idea of a single-wire telegraph?
Charles Thomas Jackson
The original telegraph Morse submitted with his patent application is now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Q 20Which British pair patented an electrical telegraph in May 1837, ahead of Morse?
Cooke and Wheatstone
They soon supplied the Great Western Railway with a 13-mile stretch of telegraph, but their multiple-wire method was overtaken by Morse's cheaper system.
Q 24What was the message of the first public telegraph transmission in 1838?
A patient waiter is no loser
The demonstration's range was limited to two miles, but the relay system meant distance was no longer a fundamental limit.
Q 25Morse's first backer in Congress, Francis Ormand Jonathan Smith, represented which state?
Maine
His funding may have been the first instance of government support for a private researcher's applied work.
Q 26How much did Congress appropriate in 1843 for an experimental telegraph line?
$30,000
The 38-mile line ran from Washington along the right-of-way of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Q 27The 1843 experimental line connected Washington, D.C., with which city?
Baltimore
In December 1842 Morse had strung wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol to win over Congress.
Q 28On May 1, 1844, the new line carried news that the Whig Party had nominated whom for president?
Henry Clay
The news reached the Capitol from the party's convention weeks before the line's official opening.
Q 29The famous first official message of May 24, 1844, was a verse from which book of the Bible?
Numbers
The verse was Numbers 23:23, and Morse sent it from the Supreme Court chamber in the basement of the Capitol.
Q 30Who chose the words of the May 24, 1844 message?
Annie Ellsworth
She was the daughter of U.S. Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, who had championed the invention and secured early funding.