Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Morse

Hustle, in a line-item invoice. Before Morse became synonymous with dots and dashes, he was a working artist trying to convert talent into rent money, and this little pricing memo lays bare the economic reality behind the myth of solitary genius. The tone is brisk, almost cheerfully transactional: five dollars for an ivory miniature, one for a profile, and the only metric that matters is whether "everybody" will bite. It reads like a creator learning, in real time, that demand isn’t a moral endorsement; it’s a market signal.

The specific intent is practical self-reporting, maybe even self-soothing. He’s tracking what the world will pay for different kinds of likeness-making, and quietly calibrating his own worth to match it. Miniatures on ivory are labor-intensive, intimate luxury objects; profiles are quicker, more reproducible, closer to a mass product. The subtext is that the cheaper work is what moves. "Everybody is willing" isn’t pride so much as relief: finally, a price point where his labor becomes legible to ordinary customers.

Context matters because it complicates the inventor narrative. Morse didn’t spring fully formed as a technological prophet; he spent years inside an attention economy where craft had to be packaged, priced, and sold. You can almost see the future engineer in the early freelancer: segment the offering, standardize the rate, validate with orders. The quote’s quiet sting is that innovation often begins as survival math.