Morse Code

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Oh, sorry, let me start over! Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts April 27, 1791. His father was pastor Jedidiah Morse, a great preacher of the Calvinist faith and a supporter of the American Federalist party.

After attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Samuel Morse went on to Yale College to receive instruction in the subjects of religious philosophy, mathematics, and science of horses. After returning home to Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1810 he wished to continue his career as a painter, but his father insisted that he must become a bookseller’s apprentice.

He attended the Royal Academy of Arts where he met and received instructions from some of the most famous English painters. In 1815, he opened an art studio in Boston and started his professional career as a painter.

Samuel, away from home, received a message that his wife was ill but by the time he got back home she had passed away. In 1832. During one of his sea voyages, he entered into conversation with a scientist Charles Thomas Jackson who described to him some of the properties of electromagnetism.

After finding out that information sent via copper cables travels instantaneously over great distances, Morse started devising the plan for the creation of a single-wire telegraph. This was a passion for him since he could have gotten the word of his wife’s illness more expeditiously.

After witnessing Jackson’s many experiments with an electromagnet, he designed the first telegraph and submitted his findings to the US patent office. He would basically spend the rest of his life fighting with patent offices for the rights of the official recognition of his telegraph. In Europe, famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and physics scientist Wilhelm Weber built the first commercial electromagnetic telegraph in 1833, entire one year before Morse managed to create his first prototype.

Also, English inventors William Cooke and Professor Charles Wheatstone started their telegraph four years after they heard of Morse’s designs, but their greater financial resources enabled them to create a working model very fast. After only three weeks of work, Cooke managed to build a small electrical telegraph. In time, the Morse code that he developed would become the primary language of telegraphy in the world. It is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.

Before the invention of the telegraph, most messages that had to be sent over long distances were carried by messengers who memorized them or carried them in writing. These messages could be delivered no faster than the fastest horse. Messages could also be sent visually, using flags and later, mechanical systems called semaphore telegraphs, but these systems required the receiver to be close enough to see the sender, and could not be used at night.

The telegraph allowed messages to be sent very fast over long distances using electricity. In 1838, Samuel Morse and his assistant, Alfred Vail, demonstrated an even more successful telegraph device that sent messages using a special code – Morse code.

Telegraph messages were sent by tapping out the code for each letter in the form of long and short signals. Short signals are referred to as dits (represented as dots).

Long signals are referred to as dahs (represented as dashes). The code was converted into electrical impulses and sent over telegraph wires. A telegraph receiver on the other end of the wire converted the impulses back into dots and dashes and decoded the message.

In 1844, Morse demonstrated the telegraph to the United States Congress using a now-famous message “What hath God wrought”. Morse’s original code was not quite the same as the one in use today as it included pauses as well as dahs and dits. However, a conference in Berlin in 1851 established an international version.

The speed at which Morse code is sent is called words per minute (WPM). Experienced operators usually work in 20-30 WPM. Morse went to the local newspaper and found which letters were used more than others. He assigned the most used a shorter code like the “e” got the shortest code the “dit”.

Morse code was used by the Union in the Civil War. The South didn’t have as many telegraph lines as the North, giving them the advantage. 1865 was the year that the International Morse Code was standardized in Europe over the American Morse Code.

A German man named Friedrich Clemens Gerke created the beginning of what was to become the International Morse code. He took Samuel Morse’s original version of the code and changed a few key parts of it. Gerke cut down the number of different dashes to just one. This reduced the number of dots in the code to help reduce distortion issues over long lines. However, doing this made transmitting the code a bit slower but more simple.

While American Morse could be sent faster, this newer version was more user-friendly and less error-prone. These few things played a big factor in the International version being adopted over the American one. Morse Code was vital for ship to shore & military use until replaced by Satellite communications in the 1990s.

Morse Code is still widely used today in Amateur Radio Communications. Morse Code (CW) is having a renaissance as many young people are enthusiastic about portable outdoor operations and CW radios are overall easier to handle.