Samuel Morse
lorenetworking
The portrait painter whose code turned electricity into a message, sent from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844.
Cooke and Wheatstone built a working telegraph in England at the same time, using moving needles; Morse used sound, and encoding is what made his version travel. The choice is the first appearance of a decision this whole field keeps repeating - that the encoding matters more than the medium. His code is also the older half of a partnership rarely stated: Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale worked on it and are usually left out, which makes this the first attribution problem on the timeline rather than the last.
Also known as: morse, samuel f b morse, telegraph