From King David’s ancient psalms lamenting his conflict with son Absalom to artist Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece mural commemorating the 1930s bombing of the Basque town Guernica, human creativity has been inspired by real-life tragedy.

What sets apart portrait painter Samuel Morse isn’t that his life influenced his art, but that the inspiration wasn’t expressed in charcoals, oils, or watercolors but in the invention of a new language.

Born in Massachusetts in 1791, Samuel entered Yale at 14, earning extra money painting portraits of his classmates. By 20, he was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and winning rave reviews for his work. Four years later, he returned to the States, and began traveling the East Coast in search of portrait assignments. During these trips, he met future wife Lucretia Walker.

The Morse family based in Connecticut, where Lucretia gave birth to a daughter and two sons. Samuel’s reputation as an artist grew, affording him the opportunity to paint President James Monroe, members of Congress and the Supreme Court, and prominent figures Eli Whitney and Noah Webster. In 1825, he was commissioned to paint the Marquis de Lafayette. It would be the final visit to America for the Frenchman who had fought alongside George Washington during the Revolution. Samuel was to receive $1,000 for the portrait—a spectacular sum at the time.

Working on the painting in New York, Samuel missed his family in New Haven. Lucretia had given birth to their third child just a few weeks earlier, and he was anxious to know how they were faring. “I long to hear from you,” he wrote her.

Lucretia never received the letter. She developed a sudden heart ailment before it arrived. By the time Samuel got word of his wife’s illness and rushed home, she’d been buried three days.

Regrouping

Devastated by Lucretia’s death and the subsequent deaths of his father and mother, Samuel traveled to Europe for an extended stay. He had always been intrigued by inventing, and on his return voyage in 1832, he and another passenger struck up a conversation on electromagnetism. Their chat sparked an idea for a quicker form of communication—one that might allow another husband to reach his wife’s bedside before it was too late. Samuel opened his artist’s sketchbook and noted his ideas for a prototype electromagnetic recording telegraph and the special language the instrument would transmit: an alphabet consisting of dots and dashes.

Five years later, Samuel Morse left the art world to devote himself fully to his telegraphy invention and its shorthand language: Morse Code.

In 1848, more than two decades after Lucretia’s death, Samuel married Sarah Griswold, a second cousin many years his junior. When Lucretia died in 1825, messages could only be delivered by post, sometimes taking weeks or even months to reach their destination. By using the memory of his loss to inform his creativity, Samuel Morse ensured that by the time Sarah delivered his seventh child in 1857, the first transatlantic cables had been laid to allow immediate communication between continents.