The cipher art is so old that it’s lost in the time. Samuel F.B Morse was a painter who was interested in electrical power and painting. He was a lazy student, when he studied arts at the university, but very smart.
In the 1832 during a trip on board the ship Sully, imagined a procedure for communicating in critical conditions. The security was always the key factor in the battle field between the armed force. He builded a device named Telegraph of a wooden frame, wheels, and an electromagnet.
This device sent messages in Morse’s code, a code made of dashes and points. It coded a set of alphabet characters. Every combination of dashes and points represented one or more alphabet characters. It was a coding form which was not a secret code, but today the science has recognized as secure code in cryptography. The USA governament inaugurated the first telegraphic line Washington-Baltimore in the 1844;but the italian governament installed the first line in the 1847 which connected Livorno to Pisa. After several legal battles the US Supreme Court established the validity of the telegraph patent. Today the inventions of telephone, radio, television and internet has obscured the Morse’s fame as inventor of telegraph; while his reputation as an artist has grown.