Todayâs Highlight in History: On April 27, 1978, 51 construction workers plunged to their deaths when a scaffold inside a cooling tower at the Pleasants Power Station site in West Virginia fell 168 feet to the ground. On this date: In 1791, the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1810, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote one of his most famous piano compositions, the Bagatelle in A-minor. In 1822, the 18th president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio. In 1865, the steamer Sultana, carrying freed Union prisoners of war, exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee; death toll estimates vary from 1,500 to 2,000.