Samuel Morse - Cleveland Street, London, UK - Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com

The blue plaque, that has some slight damage, reads:

London County Council

Samuel
Morse
1791 - 1872
American painter,
and inventor of
the Morse Code
lived here
1812 - 1915

The MIT website, in their Inventor or the Week series, tells us about Morse's Morse Code:

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, inventor of several improvements to the telegraph, was born in Charlestown, Mass. on April 27, 1791. As a student at Yale College, Morse became interested in both painting and in the developing subject of electricity. After his graduation in 1810, he first concentrated on painting, which he studied in England. He would later become a well-known portrait artist.

After moving to New York in 1825, he became a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design. He also ran for office, but was defeated in both his campaigns to become New York mayor. Meanwhile, Morse maintained a steady interest in invention, taking out three patents for pumps in 1817 with his brother Sidney Edwards Morse. It wasn't until 1832 that he first became interested in telegraphy.

That year, Morse was traveling to the United States from Europe on a ship, when he overheard a conversation about electromagnetism that inspired his idea for an electric telegraph. Though he had little training in electricity, he realized that pulses of electrical current could convey information over wires. The telegraph, a device first proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774, was an impractical machine up until that point, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. Around that time two German engineers had invented a five-wire model, but Morse wanted to be the first to reduce the number of wires to one.

Between 1832 and 1837 he developed a working model of an electric telegraph, using crude materials such as a home-made battery and old clock-work gears. He also acquired two partners to help him develop his telegraph: Leonard Gale, a professor of science at New York University, and Alfred Vail, who made available his mechanical skills and his family's New Jersey iron works to help construct better telegraph models.

Morse's first telegraph device, unveiled in 1837, did use a one-wire system, which produced an EKG-like line on tickertape. The dips in the line had to be de-coded into letters and numbers using a dictionary composed by Morse, this assuming that the pen or pencil wrote clearly, which did not always happen. By the following year he had developed an improved system, having created a dot-and-dash code that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits. (His assistant Vail has been credited by Franklin T. Pope--later a partner of Thomas Edison--with inventing this "dots and dashes" version). This coding system was significantly better, as it did not require printing or decoding, but could be "sound read" by operators. In 1838, at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York, Morse transmitted ten words per minute using the Morse code that would become standard throughout the world.

In 1842, Morse convinced Congress to provide $30,000 in support of his plan to "wire" the United States. Meanwhile, Morse also solicited and received advice from a number of American and European telegraphy experts, including Joseph Henry of Princeton, who had invented a working telegraph in 1831, and Louis Breguet of Paris. In 1844, Morse filed for a patent (granted 1849) of the printing telegraph. He had already proved that his device worked over short distances, and the Federal funds he raised had allowed him to string a wire from Baltimore to Washington. On May 11, 1844, Morse sent the first inter-city message. Soon thereafter, he gave the first public demonstration, in which he sent a message from the chamber of the Supreme Court to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore. The message itself was borrowed from the Bible by the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents and said, "What hath God wrought?" By 1846, private companies, using Morse's patent, had built telegraph lines from Washington to Boston and Buffalo, and were pushing further. The telegraph spread across the US more quickly than had the railroads, whose routes the wires often followed. By 1854, there were 23,000 miles of telegraph wire in operation. Western Union was founded in 1851, and in 1866, the first successful trans-Atlantic cable link was established. Though Morse didnât invent the telegraph and did not single-handedly create Morse Code, he may have been telegraphy's greatest promoter, and undoubtedly contributed to its rapid development and adoption throughout the world.

Morse died of pneumonia in New York on April 2, 1872. Late in his life, he shared his considerable wealth through grants to colleges such as Yale and Vassar, in addition to charities and artists.

The NYU website tells us about Morse's artisitc side:

Better known as the inventor of the electric telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse was also a professor of painting and sculpture at New York University, which was founded in 1832. His appointment that year to the first such professorship in the United States represents a milestone in his mission to promote the fine arts as truly American.

Morse's reputation alternated between recognition and neglect throughout his artistic career. His training in England from 1811 to 1815 sparked his ambition to create a more nurturing environment for the fine arts in his native country. But the material realities of the American art scene, which lacked institutional support and private patronage, forced Morse to adapt his grandiose plans, and he soon resorted to portraiture as the only marketable genre. After working as an itinerant portraitist in New Hampshire and Vermont, he resided for a while in Charleston, South Carolina, and finally settled in New York City. His clients included not only local dignitaries but also eminent national figures such as President James Monroe.

For Morse, however, portrait painting exemplified America's materialism.  Like Sir Joshua Reynolds, he considered history painting to be the most elevated genre of art. Following in the footsteps of his compatriots Benjamin West and John Trumbull, Morse modernized history painting for an American audience. His House of Representatives (1822–23; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), with its attention to contemporary costume and lack of a single dramatic moment, illustrates this approach. Set in the newly- renovated Hall of Congress, it includes individual portraits of dozens of congressmen, Supreme Court justices, journalists, and janitors, all participating in the orderly process of democratic government. Here, Morse was able to domesticate the grand ideal by fusing it with a more casual tone.

The Gallery of the Louvre (1832–33; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago), begun the year Morse assumed his teaching post at NYU, best captures his educational agenda. It features an art teacher surrounded by students in the Louvre museum in Paris. In this self-contained ideal world, where students interact with works of art from various old-master traditions, Morse conceived the past in animated relation to the present.

In 1835 he moved into NYU's new University Building, constructed in the then-fashionable neo-Gothic style at Washington Square East—on the site of the current Silver Center, the home of the Grey Art Gallery. He took the northwest tower as his studio, as well as six other rooms for himself and his students, who received both theoretical and practical instruction. As an unpaid faculty member, Morse collected fees for instruction directly from his students and was responsible for their welfare. But, greatly disappointed by his failure to secure a commission to paint a mural in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., Morse soon drew back from the arts and turned his attention to the telegraph and to his groundbreaking research in photography, conducted in collaboration with NYU Professor of Chemistry John Draper. Although he no longer taught after 1841, Morse continued to be listed as Professor of the Literature of the Arts of Design until just before his death in 1872.

Morse never realized his dream of developing a truly American public art, one that educated the populace to new heights of artistic awareness while fostering enthusiasm for a distinctly American heritage. Yet the founding of the National Academy of Design, over which he presided from 1826 to 1842, and his presentation there, first in 1826, then in 1828–29 and 1831–32, of the first educational art lectures in America (published as Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts) were significant steps in the encouragment of  the arts in America. And his paintings remain as records of his progressive contribution to the American art scene. His idealistic vision of the role of art education in developing America as a preeminent cultural force is best embodied in the Allegorical Landscape of New York University (1835–36; New-York Historical Society, New York). Here Morse transposes NYU's University Building from Washington Square to a timeless classical landscape inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century French master Claude Lorrain. Such a struggle to fuse old and new characterizes all of Morse's involvements in American cultural life.