Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse

Samuel Morse spent the first half of his life trying to become a great painter and judged himself a failure at it. In 1825 his wife died while he worked away from home, and the letter announcing her illness arrived too late for him to reach the funeral. The telegraph he would go on to develop could carry a message from Washington to Baltimore in seconds by 1844. Covering decades of patent litigation and public feuds, the book ↗ chronicles the miserable life of a man whose invention changed the world.