940
ebrated communication device, Morse spent his later
years on his estate, Locust Grove, on the Hudson River.
On 2 April 1872, the father of American photography,
passed away at his home in New York City.
Erika Piola
Biography
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born 27 April 1791 in
Charleston, Massachusetts. Educated at Phillips Acad-
emy in Andover, Yale College, and the Royal Academy,
Morse was an artist, inventor, and daguerreotypist who
pursued his various professions with a desire to create
a national American culture. He opened a Boston art
studio in 1815 and a New York art studio in 1823. In
1818, he married his fi rst wife, Lucretia Walker, with
whom he had three children, and in 1848, married his
second wife and cousin, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold,
with whom he had four children. From 1826 to 1832
he organized and was elected president of the National
Academy of Design and became an art professor at the
University of the City of New York. In 1840, he opened
a daguerreotype studio and was granted a patent for the
invention of the telegraph. Between 1836 and 1854, he
ran unsuccessfully for the offi ces of New York Mayor
and Congressman. In 1854 the Supreme Court upheld
his telegraph patent for which he received several na-
tional and international honors. Morse spent his later
years in Europe and at his estate Locust Grove. He died
2 April 1872 in New York City.
See also: Bogardus, Abraham; Brady, Mathew,
Daguerreotype; Draper, John; Daguerre, Louis-
Jacques-Mandé; Hill, Levi H., and Southworth, Albert
Sands, and Josiah Johnson Hawes.
Further Reading
Kloss, William, Samuel F.B. Morse, New York: H.N. Abrams
in association with the National Museum of American Art,
1988.
Larkin, Oliver W. Samuel F. B. Morse and American Democratic
Art, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954.
Mabee, Carleton, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F.B.
Morse, Flesichmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, 2000.
Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, Samuel F.B. Morse: His Letters
and Journals, edited and supplemented by his Son Edward
Lind Morse, New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1914.
Prime, Samuel Irenaeus, The Life of Samuel F.B. Morse, LL.D.,
Inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1875.
Rinhart, Floyd and Marion Rinhart, The American Daguerreo-
type, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1981.
Root, Marcus, The Camera and the Pencil, or the Heliographic
Art, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1864.
Silverman, Kenneth, Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel
F.B. Morse, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Staiti, Paul J., Samuel F.B. Morse, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989.
MOSCIONI, ROMUALDO (1849–1925)
Italian photographer
From Viterbo, south of Rome, Moscioni had a success-
ful photography business during the albumen period
at various addresses in Rome from 1868 onwards. He
specialised in topographical views, excavations, early
Christian archaeology along with art works, includ-
ing Etruscan, which will continue to provide histori-
cal information for generations to come. In 1889 his
business moved to the fashionable Via Condotti which
demonstrated his success on becoming the “purveyor
to the Imperial museums of Berlin, Petersburg and the
Art Museum of Copenhagen.” He was in competition
with similar material from the larger companies, such
as Alinari, Anderson, Brogi. His fourth catalogue, pub-
lished in 1921, listed 24,900 images (26,000 by the time
of his death). Between 1868 and 1895 he had amassed
8,600 negatives. At the turn of the century he was still
making, 300+ negatives on average per year but between
1903 and 1921 it rose to 700. Fortunately around 26,000
glass plate negatives, much of his life’s work, were di-
vided between the archives of the Vatican Museum, the
American Academy in Rome, the Ministry of Education,
and the Archivo Forografi co Comunale in Rome. Thus
Moscioni is one of the few photographers of the period
whose large output is so fortunately preserved.
Alistair CrawfordMOTION PHOTOGRAPHY:
PRECHRONOPHOTOGRAPHY TO
CINEMATOGRAPHY
With the application of photography, the free-fl owing
images of the artist’s camera obscura were frozen, and
it would be several decades before motion could be re-
corded and reproduced by the new medium. However,
moving images produced from a series of pictures pre-
ceded the commercial introduction of photography. In
1832 Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau, investigating the
phenomena of Faraday’s Wheel, devised the phenakis-
tiscope, a cardboard disc with a sequence of drawings
that appeared to move when the images, refl ected by a
mirror, were viewed through slots in the disc. Viennese
Professor Simon Stampfer simultaneously developed
his similar Stroboscope. These “philosophical toys”
were soon being sold as conversation pieces, and led to
the daedelum drum-form version, suggested by English
mathematician William George Horner, and marketed
from the 1860s as the zoetrope.
The application of photography to moving images
was inevitable, but slow exposure times before the
1860s/70s meant that photographing sequences of
subjects moving in “real time” was an impossibility.
Experimenters compiled sequences from series of static