Alfred Vail
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Alfred Lewis Vail (September 25, 1807 - January 18, 1859) was a machinist and inventor. He was a partner of Samuel F. B. Morse in the development of the telegraph. Following Morse' public demonstration of the marking telegraph on 2 September 1837, Vail partnered with him to perfect the instruments, especially the relay.
Vail is best known as the developer of the Morse code in the form close to as it is known today. For the use on the his original equipment, Samuel Morse developed the dictionary based code which encoded the whole words, and he used it in public demonstrations as late as of 1838. The same year, while working for Morse, Alfred Vail developed the encoding of the alphabet and the equipment which can be used in practice.
Vail died poor (having had to sell stocks he owned at the time they were undervalued) and his contribution to the code was pushed by his wife Amanda following his death.
External links
- "[1] (http://speedwell.org/Vail/AVbio.html)". Alfred Vail Biography at speedwell.org
- "[2] (http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/tel/morse/morse.htm)". The Electromagnetic Telegraph by J. B. Calvertnl:Alfred Vail
