When was Morse Code created?
Morse code
Morse code has been in use for more than 160 years—longer than any other electrical coding system. What is called Morse code today is actually somewhat different from what was originally developed by Vail and Morse. The Modern International Morse code, or "continental code", was created by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and initially used for telegraphy between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany. Gerke changed nearly half of the alphabet and all of the numerals, providing the foundation for the modern form of the code. After some minor changes, International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in 1865 in Paris and was later made the standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Morse's original code specification, largely limited to use in the United States and Canada, became known as American Morse code or "railroad code". American Morse code is now seldom used except in historical re-enactments.
International Code of Signals
The International Code of Signals was preceded by a variety of naval signals and private signals, most notably Marryat's Code, the most widely used code flags prior to 1857. What is now the International Code of Signals was drafted in 1855 by the British Board of Trade and published in 1857 as the Commercial Code. It came in two parts: the first containing universal and international signals, and the second British signals only. Eighteen separate signal flags (see chart) were used to make over 70,000 possible messages. Vowels were omitted from the set to avoid spelling out any word that might be objectionable in any language, and some little-used letters were also omitted. It was revised by the Board of Trade in 1887, and was modified at the International Conference of 1889 in Washington, D.C. The new international code of signals officially came into worldwide operation on 1 January 1901. At first it was used concurrently with the old system, and then used exclusively after 1 January 1902. In this new edition, the number of flags was increased from 18 flags plus a code pennant to 26 flags and a code pennant. The 8 new flags represented the vowels A E I O U and the letters X Y Z.
Morse code
International contests in code copying are still occasionally held. In July 1939 at a contest in Asheville, North Carolina in the United States Ted R. McElroy set a still-standing record for Morse copying, 75.2 wpm. William Pierpont N0HFF also notes that some operators may have passed 100 wpm. By this time, they are "hearing" phrases and sentences rather than words. The fastest speed ever sent by a straight key was achieved in 1942 by Harry Turner W9YZE (d. 1992) who reached 35 wpm in a demonstration at a U.S. Army base. To accurately compare code copying speed records of different eras it is useful to keep in mind that different standard words (50 dot durations versus 60 dot durations) and different interword gaps (5 dot durations versus 7 dot durations) may have been used when determining such speed records. For example, speeds run with the CODEX standard word and the PARIS standard may differ by up to 20%.
Morse code
The Morse code, as it is used internationally today, was derived from a much refined proposal which became known as "Hamburg alphabet" by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848. It was adopted by the Deutsch-Österreichischer Telegraphenverein (German-Austrian Telegraph Society) in 1851. This finally led to the International Morse code in 1865.
Morse Code (horse)
In the 1937/38 National Hunt season Morse Code made steady progress to become regarded as one of the best steeplechasers in Britain. On his final prep race for Cheltenham he finished third to Airgead Sios and Macauley. In the Cheltenham Gold Cup on 10 March he faced Airgead Sios and Macauley again but most of the attention was focused on the eleven-year-old Golden Miller who had won five consecutive runnings of the race from 1932 to 1936. Ridden by Danny Morgan he started the 13/2 fourth choice in the betting in an eight-runner field with Golden Miller going off the 7/4 favourite. The race was run at a slow pace and as the horses approached the second last fence Airgead Sios, Morse Code, Golden Miller and Macauley were closely grouped. Airgead Sios made a bad mistake and hampered Macauley, taking both horses out of contention and leaving Morse Code in front with Golden Miller as his only serious rival. Golden Miller attempted to launch a challenge at the last fence, but Morse code stayed on too strongly for the favourite and won by two lengths, with three lengths back to Macauley in third. Morse Code's victory received a muted response from the 20,000 crowd, with most of the cheers being reserved for the runner-up. The horse's owner received a first prize of £720 which included a cup valued at £150.
Principle of least action
In 1842, Carl Gustav Jacobi tackled the problem of whether the variational principle always found minima as opposed to other stationary points (maxima or stationary saddle points); most of his work focused on geodesics on two-dimensional surfaces. The first clear general statements were given by Marston Morse in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to what is now known as Morse theory. For example, Morse showed that the number of conjugate points in a trajectory equalled the number of negative eigenvalues in the second variation of the Lagrangian.
Bit
The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted by Semen Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM. Another variant of that idea was the perforated paper tape. In all those systems, the medium (card or tape) conceptually carried an array of hole positions; each position could be either punched through or not, thus carrying one bit of information. The encoding of text by bits was also used in Morse code (1844) and early digital communications machines such as teletypes and stock ticker machines (1870).
The Underland Chronicles
The "Tree of Transmission" is a visual representation of the Underland equivalent of Morse code, i.e. a method of transmitting information over long distances using repeating patterns. The code has no official name, as it is the only code to have been created by humans, rats, mice, spiders, crawlers, and bats together. It is very similar to Morse code, but with a few important differences. The first is that it is only transmitted with sound, usually through the stone of underground tunnels, while Morse code can also be used by switching a source of light or electricity on and off. This is because of the code's use of three distinct sounds (a "click", a "scratch", and a "tap"), while Morse code differentiates symbols only through the length of transmission. The other main difference from the Overland code is the lack of number symbols.
CQD
Although used worldwide by Marconi operators, CQD was never adopted as an international standard, since it could be mistaken for a general call "CQ" if the reception were poor. At the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention, held in Berlin in 1906, Germany's "" distress signal of three-dots/three-dashes/three-dots () was adopted as the international Morse code distress signal. (This distress signal soon became known as "SOS" because if gaps are inserted it can be thought of as the Morse codes for those letters – by contrast CQD is transmitted as three distinct letters with a short gap between each. Germany had first adopted this distress signal in regulations effective 1 April 1905.)
Philip Howard Colomb
Colomb saw that the introduction of steam into the navy would necessitate a new system of signals, and new tactics. He set himself to devise the former as far back as 1858. Working with Francis John Bolton, he worked out a Morse code system with signal lamps about 1862. This system of signals was adopted by the navy in 1867.
Morse code for non-Latin alphabets
See Wabun code.
Electrical telegraph
For a brief period, starting with the New York-Boston line in 1848, some telegraph networks began to employ sound operators, who were trained to understand Morse code aurally. Gradually, the use of sound operators eliminated the need for telegraph receivers to include register and tape. Instead, the receiving instrument was developed into a "sounder", an electromagnet that was energized by a current and attracted a small iron lever. When the sounding key was opened or closed, the sounder lever struck an anvil. The Morse operator distinguished a dot and a dash by the short or long interval between the two clicks. The message was then written out in long-hand.
American Morse code
The Gerke code was adopted as a standard for transmission over cables by the Austro-German Telegraph Union (which included many central European states) at a conference in 1851. It was necessary to have a common code as the Union had also agreed to direct connection of cables across borders (as opposed to recoding and retransmission by an operator).
The code was adopted as the European standard in 1865, and was known at first as "Continental Morse," although as its use spread it also became known as "International Morse." At this point the original Morse Code started to be called American Morse, to differentiate between the two main standards.
American Morse code
There was some resistance to adopting International Morse in the US. This resulted in international Morse operators in the US needing to be proficient in both codes since messages on transatlantic cables were in the international code, and incoming messages needed to be recoded and sent on in American Morse. An attempt in 1854 to make International Morse the standard within the US was rejected by the telegraph companies. Overhead wires, used for most land routes in the US, have nowhere near as big a problem with dispersion as undersea or underground cables and the companies had no wish to retrain their staff.
Mayday
Before the voice call "mayday", SOS was the Morse code equivalent of the mayday call. In 1927, the International Radiotelegraph Convention of Washington adopted the voice call mayday as the radiotelephone distress call in place of the SOS radiotelegraph (Morse code) call.
Samuel Morse
Morse at one time adopted Wheatstone and Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting an electrical telegraph signal through a body of water or down steel railroad tracks or anything conductive. He went to great lengths to win a lawsuit for the right to be called "inventor of the telegraph" and promoted himself as being an inventor. But Alfred Vail also played an important role in the development of the Morse code, which was based on earlier codes for the electromagnetic telegraph.
SOLAS Convention
In particular, amendments in 1988 based on amendments of International Radio Regulations in 1987 replaced Morse code with the Global Maritime Distress Safety System (GMDSS) and came into force beginning 1 February 1992. The issues covered by the treaty are set out in the list of sections (above).
Morse code
Because Morse code is usually sent by hand, it is unlikely that an operator could be that precise with the dot length, and the individual characteristics and preferences of the operators usually override the standards.
DCF77
There was also a Morse code station identification until 2006, sent during minutes 19, 39 and 59 of each hour, however this was discontinued as the station is easily identifiable by the characteristic signal. A 250 Hz tone was generated by square wave modulating the carrier between 100% and 85% power, and that tone was used to send one letter per second, between the second marks. During seconds 20–32, the call sign "DCF77" was transmitted twice.
George J. Laurer
George Joseph Laurer (born September 23, 1925 in New York, NY) developed the Universal Product Code, commonly known as the barcode, in 1973. As an engineer at IBM, he was asked to develop the pattern used for the Universal Product Code.
KPH (radio station)
Over the years radioteletype was improved and computerized, giving rise to new digital transmission modes such as Clover and PACTOR. Satellite communications became a technically and commercially viable alternative to terrestrial radio links. Ship radio equipment became more advanced and automated, requiring fewer radio officers - or none. By the 1990s few ship stations were equipped for Morse code or had any use for it, so coast stations re-allocated their Morse frequencies to other uses. Some stations disappeared from the airwaves altogether, as did KPH after being acquired by Globe Wireless in 1997. Its Morse code traffic was then diverted to other stations such as KFS in Half Moon Bay, California, another Globe Wireless station. KFS continued to handle Morse code traffic until July 13, 1999 (Universal time; actually July 12 in the Pacific time zone) when it made its "last ever" Morse transmission, ceremonially marking the supposed end of commercial Morse code usage in America (as distinct from amateur Morse code usage, which continues). This anniversary is commemorated on the air every July as the "Night of Nights" by KPH and other coast radio stations, along with radio amateurs who participate on their own frequencies.
Frequency-shift keying
In 1910, Reginald Fessenden invented a two-tone method of transmitting Morse code. Dots and dashes were replaced with different tones of equal length. The intent was to minimize transmission time.
Morse code
During early World War I (1914–1916), Germany briefly experimented with 'dotty' and 'dashy' Morse, in essence adding a dot or a dash at the end of each Morse symbol. Each one was quickly broken by Allied SIGINT, and standard Morse was restored by Spring 1916. Only a small percentage of Western Front (North Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea) traffic was in 'dotty' or 'dashy' Morse during the entire war. In popular culture, this is mostly remembered in the book "The Codebreakers" by Kahn and in the national archives of the UK and Australia (whose SIGINT operators copied most of this Morse variant). Kahn's cited sources come from the popular press and wireless magazines of the time.
Joshua Sieger
By the age of 13 Sieger had erected an aerial on his parents' house. The young boy waited tentatively for a signal, and received his first Morse Code transmission from Gibraltar on the device in 1920.
Morse code
Morse code also requires less signal bandwidth than voice communication, typically , compared to the roughly 2400 Hz used by single-sideband voice, although at a lower data rate.
KW-37
The KW-37, code named JASON, was an encryption system developed In the 1950s by the U.S. National Security Agency to protect fleet broadcasts of the U.S. Navy. Naval doctrine calls for warships at sea to maintain radio silence to the maximum extent possible to prevent ships from being located by potential adversaries using radio direction finding. To allow ships to receive messages and orders, the navy broadcast a continuous stream of information, originally in Morse code and later using radioteletype. Messages were included in this stream as needed and could be for individual ships, battle groups or the fleet as a whole. Each ship's radio room would monitor the broadcast and decode and forward those messages directed at her to the appropriate officer. 
The KW-37 was designed to automate this process. It consisted of two major components, the KWR-37 receive unit and the KWT-37 transmit unit. Each ship had a complement of KWR-37 receivers (usually at least two) that decrypted the fleet broadcast and fed the output to teleprinter machines. KWT-37's were typically located at shore facilities, where high power transmitters were located.
Morse code
In addition, rapidly moving armies in the field could not have fought effectively without radiotelegraphy because they moved more rapidly than telegraph and telephone lines could be erected. This was seen especially in the blitzkrieg offensives of the Nazi German Wehrmacht in Poland, Belgium, France (in 1940), the Soviet Union, and in North Africa; by the British Army in North Africa, Italy, and the Netherlands; and by the U.S. Army in France and Belgium (in 1944), and in southern Germany in 1945.
Morse code was used as an international standard for maritime distress until 1999 when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System. When the French Navy ceased using Morse code on January 31, 1997, the final message transmitted was "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." In the United States the final commercial Morse code transmission was on July 12, 1999, signing off with Samuel Morse's original 1844 message, "What hath God wrought", and the prosign "SK".
Pundit Beacon
By 1937, all airfields used for night flying were also equipped with a Pundit Beacon. This used red lamps to flash the two-letter Pundit Code in Morse. The beacon was visible all around in azimuth. The Morse code sequence was programmed for each beacon with a disc sequencer, a rotating disc with a ring of brass studs placed into it.
Kenny McBain
http://www.thenational.scot/news/15029340.the-scot-who-cracked-the-morse-code/
QR code
The QR code system was invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. Its purpose was to track vehicles during manufacturing; it was designed to allow high-speed component scanning. QR codes are now used in a much broader context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile-phone users (termed mobile tagging). QR codes may be used to display text to the user, to add a vCard contact to the user's device, to open a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), to connect to a wireless network, or to compose an email or text message. There are a great many QR code generators available as software or as online tools. The QR code has become one of the most-used types of two-dimensional code.
Women's Emergency Signalling Corps
It quickly became apparent that men in the armed forces also urgently needed training in wireless communications and McKenzie's female trainees were in a position to train the male servicemen directly:
Early in the war, one young would-be pilot tried to enlist but was refused because he didn't know Morse code. By sheer coincidence he walked past [the Women's Emergency Signalling Corps on Clarence Street] and heard the sounds of Morse signalling. "It was just a room full of women", remembered Mrs McKenzie, "but he walked up to me and said 'Will you teach me Morse code?" I just heaved a big sigh because I saw a whole world opening up in front of me. Then I knew what we could do. We could train girls to train the men. It was wonderful, because I'd thought we could only do things like relieving in the post office."
The premises at 9 Clarence Street became overcrowded, so McKenzie moved the operation to an old wool store at 10 Clarence Street, where during the 1940s the WESC occupied the first and second floors, which she renovated with linoleum flooring and installed radio equipment for twelve classes. Sometimes military intelligence personnel would appear at the school with complaints from guests in the pub next door, who thought a spy operation was at work when they heard Morse code through the walls each evening.
Marston Morse
Harold Calvin Marston Morse (March 24, 1892 – June 22, 1977) was an American mathematician best known for his work on the "calculus of variations in the large", a subject where he introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory. The Morse–Palais lemma, one of the key results in Morse theory, is named after him, as is the Thue–Morse sequence, an infinite binary sequence with many applications. In 1933 he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in mathematical analysis.
QSA and QRK radio signal reports
The QSA code and QRK code are interrelated and complimentary signal reporting codes for use in wireless telegraphy (Morse code). An enhanced format, SINPO code, was published in the ITU Radio Regulations, Geneva, 1959, but is longer and unwieldy for use in the fast pace of Morse code communications.
Morse code
In one case reported in the radio amateur magazine "QST", an old shipboard radio operator who had a stroke and lost the ability to speak or write could communicate with his physician (a radio amateur) by blinking his eyes in Morse. Two examples of communication in intensive care units were also published in "QST", Another example occurred in 1966 when prisoner of war Jeremiah Denton, brought on television by his North Vietnamese captors, Morse-blinked the word "TORTURE". In these two cases, interpreters were available to understand those series of eye-blinks.
Train dispatcher
Initially, train dispatchers issued train orders using American Morse code over telegraph wires. Later, after the telephone was invented in 1876 and became common, most railroads constructed their own telephone systems, for internal communications, which the train dispatchers used to issue train orders. The last train order known to have been issued using Morse code was copied at Whitehall, Montana, on May 6, 1982, on the Burlington Northern Railroad.
Morse code
Prosigns for Morse code are special (usually) unwritten procedural signals or symbols that are used to indicate changes in communications protocol status or white space text formatting actions.
Telegraph code
A telegraph code is one of the character encodings used to transmit information through telegraphy machines. The most famous such code is Morse code.
Telegraph code
Morse code can be transmitted and received with very simple electrical equipment, such as the electrical telegraph invented in 1816. Morse code represents each letter of the alphabet as a series of "dots and dashes" (short and long bursts of electronically-generated noise). The speed of sending is directly related to the length of the shortest (dot) element: a dash is three dots long, an inter-character gap is the same length (3 dots), and inter-word and sentence gaps should be 5 or 7 dots long (change from earlier standard – 5 dots). The speed of sending is also referred to as words per minute, and is classically based on the 'paris' formula - as 'paris' is considered to be an average length word. See main article on Morse Code.
Prosigns for Morse code
The procedure signs below are compiled from the official specification for Morse Code, ITU-R M.1677, International Morse Code, while others are defined the International Radio Regulations, including ITU-R M.1170, ITU-R M.1172, and the International Code of Signals, with a few details of their usage appearing in ACP-131, which otherwise defines operating signals, not procedure signals.
Newline
In the mid-1800s, long before the advent of teleprinters and teletype machines, Morse code operators or telegraphists invented and used Morse code prosigns to encode white space text formatting in formal written text messages. In particular the Morse prosign represented by the concatenation of two literal textual Morse code "A" characters sent without the normal inter-character spacing is used in Morse code to encode and indicate a "new line" in a formal text message.
Morse code
Morse Code, when transmitted essentially, creates an AM signal (even in on/off keying mode), assumptions about signal can be made with respect to similarly timed RTTY signalling. Because Morse code transmissions employ an on-off keyed radio signal, it requires less complex transmission equipment than other forms of radio communication.
Continuous wave
In military communications and amateur radio the terms "CW" and "Morse code" are often used interchangeably, despite the distinctions between the two. Aside from radio signals, Morse code may be sent using direct current in wires, sound, or light, for example. For radio signals, a carrier wave is keyed on and off to represent the dots and dashes of the code elements. The carrier's amplitude and frequency remains constant during each code element. At the receiver, the received signal is mixed with a heterodyne signal from a BFO (beat frequency oscillator) to change the radio frequency impulses to sound. Though most commercial traffic has now ceased operation using Morse it is still popular with amateur radio operators. Non-directional beacons (NDB) and VHF omnidirectional radio range (VOR) used in air navigation use Morse to transmit their identifier.
Telegraphist
The use of Morse code is over a century old. Fluent Morse code telegraphers still enjoy sending Morse code using manually operated mechanical keys or electronic keyers. Although Morse code is no longer used in commercial practices, the use of hand-sent Morse code seems to be growing among amateur radio operators, even though Morse proficiency is no longer required to obtain an amateur radio licence.
Samuel Morse
On April 1, 2012, Google announced the release of "Gmail Tap", an April Fools' Day joke that allowed users to use Morse Code to send text from their mobile phones. Morse's great-great-grandnephew Reed Morse—a Google engineer—was instrumental in the prank, which became a real product.
Barcode
The barcode was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver and patented in the US in 1952 (US Patent 2,612,994). The invention was based on Morse code that was extended to thin and thick bars. However, it took over twenty years before this invention became commercially successful. An early use of one type of barcode in an industrial context was sponsored by the Association of American Railroads in the late 1960s. Developed by General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) and called KarTrak ACI (Automatic Car Identification), this scheme involved placing colored stripes in various combinations on steel plates which were affixed to the sides of railroad rolling stock. Two plates were used per car, one on each side, with the arrangement of the colored stripes encoding information such as ownership, type of equipment, and identification number. The plates were read by a trackside scanner, located for instance, at the entrance to a classification yard, while the car was moving past. The project was abandoned after about ten years because the system proved unreliable after long-term use.
Samuel Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, OIC (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
Morse code
The very long time constants of 19th and early 20th century submarine communications cables required a different form of Morse signalling. Instead of keying a voltage on and off for varying times, the dits and dahs were represented by two polarities of voltage impressed on the cable, for a uniform time.
Osnabrück
Friedrich Clemens Gerke, writer, journalist, musician and pioneer of telegraphy who revised the Morse code in 1848, is another of the city's famous sons. (Gerke's notation is still used today.) Fritz Buntrock, born in the city, was an SS officer at Auschwitz concentration camp and was executed for war crimes. Wilhelm Schitli, also born in the city, was also a Nazi SS concentration camp commandant.
Morse code
In the original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved in and out of position to mark the paper tape. The telegraph operators soon learned that they could translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes, and write these down by hand, thus making the paper tape unnecessary. When Morse code was adapted to radio communication, the dots and dashes were sent as short and long tone pulses. It was later found that people become more proficient at receiving Morse code when it is taught as a language that is heard, instead of one read from a page.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was a painter, but also a noted inventor. After extensive travel in Europe, Morse invented the first recording telegraph, which he submitted at patent for in 1837. His system of dots and dashes, equip with a dictionary and words, later was known as Morse Code. After his death on April 2, 1872, the Society was willed funds “for the encouragement of geographical research.”
Signal strength and readability report
As the earliest radio communication used Morse code, all radio signal reporting formats until about the 1920s were for radiotelegraph, and the early voice radio signal report formats were based on the telegraph report formats.The QSA code and QRK code are interrelated and complimentary signal reporting codes for use in wireless telegraphy (Morse code). They replaced the earlier QSJ code.
Morse code
The International Morse Code encodes the ISO basic Latin alphabet, some extra Latin letters, the Arabic numerals and a small set of punctuation and procedural signals (prosigns). Each Morse code symbol is formed by a sequence of dots and dashes. The dot duration is the basic unit of time measurement in Morse code transmission. The duration of a dash is three times the duration of a dot. Each dot or dash within a character is followed by period of signal absence, called a "space", equal to the dot duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space of duration equal to three dots, and the words are separated by a space equal to seven dots. To increase the efficiency of encoding, Morse code was designed so that the length of each symbol is approximately inverse to the frequency of occurrence in text of the English language character that it represents. Thus the most common letter in English, the letter "E", has the shortest code: a single dot. Because the Morse code elements are specified by proportion rather than specific time durations, the code is usually transmitted at the highest rate that the receiver is capable of decoding. The Morse code transmission rate ("speed") is specified in "groups per minute", commonly referred to as "words per minute".
Russian Morse code
The Russian Morse code approximates the Morse code for the Latin alphabet. It was enacted by the Russian government in 1856.
Q code
The original Q codes were created, "circa" 1909, by the British government as a "list of abbreviations... prepared for the use of British ships and coast stations licensed by the Postmaster General". The Q codes facilitated communication between maritime radio operators speaking different languages, so they were soon adopted internationally. A total of forty-five Q codes appeared in the "List of Abbreviations to be used in Radio Communications", which was included in the Service Regulations affixed to the Third International Radiotelegraph Convention in London (The Convention was signed on July 5, 1912, and became effective July 1, 1913.)
Character encoding
The history of character codes illustrates the evolving need for machine-mediated character-based symbolic information over a distance, using once-novel electrical means. The earliest codes were based upon manual and hand-written encoding and cyphering systems, such as Bacon's cipher, Braille, International maritime signal flags, and the 4-digit encoding of Chinese characters for a Chinese telegraph code (Hans Schjellerup, 1869). With the adoption of electrical and electro-mechanical techniques these earliest codes were adapted to the new capabilities and limitations of the early machines. The earliest well-known electrically-transmitted character code, Morse code, introduced in the 1840s, used a system of four "symbols" (short signal, long signal, short space, long space) to generate codes of variable length. Though most commercial use of Morse code was via machinery, it was also used as a manual code, generatable by hand on a telegraph key and decipherable by ear, and persists in amateur radio use. Most codes are of fixed per-character length or variable-length sequences of fixed-length codes (eg. Unicode).
Common examples of character encoding systems include Morse code, the Baudot code, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and Unicode. Unicode, a well defined and extensible encoding system, has supplanted most earlier character encodings, but the path of code development to the present is fairly well known.
Samuel Morse
While returning by ship from Europe in 1832, Morse encountered Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston, a man who was well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson's electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph. He set aside his painting, "The Gallery of the Louvre". The original Morse telegraph, submitted with his patent application, is part of the collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. In time the Morse code, which he developed, would become the primary language of telegraphy in the world. It is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.
Norman Joseph Woodland
Woodland took some stock market earnings, quit his teaching job and moved to his grandfather's Florida apartment. While at the beach, Woodland again considered the problem, recalling, from his Boy Scout training, how Morse code dots and dashes are used to send information electronically. He drew dots and dashes in the sand similar to the shapes used in Morse code. After pulling them downward with his fingers, producing thin lines resulting from the dots and thick lines from the dashes, he came up with the concept of a two-dimensional, linear Morse code, and after sharing it with Silver and adapting optical sound film technology, they applied for a patent on October 20, 1949, receiving "Classifying Apparatus and Method" on October 7, 1952, covering both linear barcode and circular bulls-eye printing designs.
Digital Morse theory
In mathematics, Digital Morse theory is a digital adaptation of continuum Morse theory for scalar volume data. This is not about the Samuel Morse's Morse Code of long and short clicks or tones used in manual electric telegraphy. The term was first promulgated by DB Karron based on the work of JL Cox and DB Karron.
Morse Code (horse)
Morse Code was a liver chestnut gelding (sometimes oddly described as "bay or chestnut") with a narrow white blaze bred in the United Kingdom by Dealtry Charles Part. During his racing career he was owned by Part and trained by Ivor Anthony at Wroughton in Wiltshire. He was the only horse of any consequence sired by The Pilot, a son of the American-bred Tracery. His dam, Heliograph was descended from the broodmare Encore, making her a distant relative of the Belmont Stakes winners Burgomaster and Johren.
Telegraphy
At first associated with the railways, the electric telegraph quickly became a means of more general communication. The Morse telegraph was officially adopted as the standard for continental European telegraphy in 1851 with a revised code, which later became the basis of International Morse Code. However, Great Britain and the British Empire continued to use the Cooke and Wheatstone system, in some places as late as the 1930s. Likewise, the United States continued to use American Morse code internally, requiring translation operators skilled in both codes for international messages.
A teleprinter is a telegraph machine that can send messages from a typewrite-like keyboard and print incoming messages in readable text with no need for the operators to be trained in the telegraph code used on the line. It developed from various earlier printing telegraphs and resulted in improved transmission speeds. The Morse telegraph (1837) was originally conceived as a system marking indentations on paper tape. A chemical telegraph making blue marks improved the speed of recording (Bain, 1846), but was retarded by a patent challenge from Morse. The first true printing telegraph (that is printing in plain text) used a spinning wheel of types in the manner of a daisy wheel printer (House, 1846, improved by Hughes, 1855). The system was adopted by Western Union.
Morin code
The Code details procedures for organizational meetings, and was inspired by "Robert's Rules of Order". It is the principal procedural code used in Quebec and in the francophone regions of New Brunswick.
Economic history of the United States
Radio communications using Morse code were introduced in the first decade of the 20th century. Their main use was for communicating with ships. Ship radio became more widely used after the sinking of the RMS "Titanic" in 1912.
Morse code
In the United Kingdom, many people learned the Morse code by means of a series of words or phrases that have the same rhythm as a Morse character. For instance, "Q" in Morse is dah-dah-di-dah, which can be memorized by the phrase "God save the Queen", and the Morse for "F" is di-di-dah-dit, which can be memorized as "Did she like it."
Morse Code (horse)
Morse Code showed early promise and recorded his first major win when he won the Grand Annual Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. He had no chance to follow up in the following year as the meeting was abandoned. He was seen as a potential Grand National contender but was not entered in the race.
American Morse code
Various other companies and countries soon developed their own variations of the original Morse Code. Of special importance was one standard, originally created in Germany by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848, which was simpler—it eliminated the long intra-character spaces and the two long dashes—but also included changes in the sequences for eleven of the letters and most of the numerals. The Gerke code had a distinct advantage for use on undersea telegraph cables. Cables suffer from a type of distortion called dispersion that gets progressively worse with the length of the cable. Dispersion severely limits the rate that Morse can be sent because of intersymbol interference. For instance, the first transatlantic telegraph cable of 1858 could only sustain a transmission rate of less than 1 word per minute. This interference is worse with American Morse because it has a greater proportion of closely spaced dots than the Gerke code.
History of telecommunication
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Samuel Morse developed a version of the electrical telegraph which he demonstrated on 2 September 1837. Alfred Vail saw this demonstration and joined Morse to develop the register—a telegraph terminal that integrated a logging device for recording messages to paper tape. This was demonstrated successfully over three miles (five kilometres) on 6 January 1838 and eventually over forty miles (sixty-four kilometres) between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore on 24 May 1844. The patented invention proved lucrative and by 1851 telegraph lines in the United States spanned over 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometres). Morse's most important technical contribution to this telegraph was the simple and highly efficient Morse Code, co-developed with Vail, which was an important advance over Wheatstone's more complicated and expensive system, and required just two wires. The communications efficiency of the Morse Code preceded that of the Huffman code in digital communications by over 100 years, but Morse and Vail developed the code purely empirically, with shorter codes for more frequent letters.
Signal strength and readability report
Amateur radio users in the U.S. and Canada have used the R-S-T system since 1934. This system was developed by amateur radio operator Arthur W. Braaten, W2BSR. It reports the readability on a scale of 1 to 5, the signal strength on a scale of 1 to 9, and the tone of the Morse code continuous wave signal on a scale of 1 to 9. During amateur radio contests, where the rate of new contacts is paramount, contest participants often give a perfect signal report of 599 even when the signal is lower quality, because always providing the same signal format enables them to send Morse code with less thought and thus increased speed.
Morse code
The symbols !, $ and & are not defined inside the ITU recommendation on Morse code, but conventions for them exist. The @ symbol was formally added in 2004.There is no standard representation for the exclamation mark (!), although the KW digraph () was proposed in the 1980s by the Heathkit Company (a vendor of assembly kits for amateur radio equipment).
Morse code
People learning Morse code using the Farnsworth method are taught to send and receive letters and other symbols at their full target speed, that is with normal relative timing of the dots, dashes, and spaces within each symbol for that speed. The Farnsworth method is named for Donald R. "Russ" Farnsworth, also known by his call sign, W6TTB. However, initially exaggerated spaces between symbols and words are used, to give "thinking time" to make the sound "shape" of the letters and symbols easier to learn. The spacing can then be reduced with practice and familiarity.
Green Monster
The Morse Code that appears from top to bottom in the white lines of the American League scoreboard are the initials of former owners Thomas A. Yawkey and Jean R. Yawkey.
Morse Code (horse)
Morse Code (foaled 1929) was a British Thoroughbred racehorse who won the 1938 Cheltenham Gold Cup. His Gold Cup victory was achieved at the expense of Golden Miller, who was attempting to win the race for the sixth time. He had previously won the Grand Annual Chase and went on to finish second when odds-on favourite for the Gold Cup in 1939.
Morse code
For commercial radiotelegraph licenses in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission specifies tests for Morse code proficiency in words per minute and in code groups per minute. The Commission specifies that a word is 5 characters long. The Commission specifies Morse code test elements at 16 code groups per minute, 20 words per minute, 20 code groups per minute, and 25 words per minute. The word per minute rate would be close to the PARIS standard, and the code groups per minute would be close to the CODEX standard.
Bruce Perens
Perens founded No-Code International in 1998 with the goal of ending the Morse Code test then required for an amateur radio license. His rationale was that amateur radio should be a tool for young people to learn advanced technology and networking, rather than something that preserved antiquity and required new hams to master outmoded technology before they were allowed on the air.
Pebble Beach, California
In 1908, architect Lewis P. Hobart was hired by PIC manager A.D. Shepard to design the Pebble Beach Lodge, a rustic log-cabin-style one-story inn completed by 1909. The rambling lodge, featuring private patio nooks and a wide pergola made of local logs, was positioned halfway along 17-Mile Drive, overlooking Pebble Beach. The great hall or assembly room was wide and was flanked by massive fireplaces at each end. A tavern and kitchen supplied food and drink, and later, cottages could be rented for overnight guests. Operated under the same management as the Hotel Del Monte, food service was available at all hours, including fresh local abalone chowder. The lodge was built as the community center for the wealthy residents of the Del Monte Forest, and was popular as a rest stop for 17-Mile Drive motorists. Samuel Finley Brown Morse, a distant cousin to Samuel F. B. Morse known as the inventor of Morse Code, was hired in the 1910s to manage the PIC. In 1916, Morse convinced the PIC to create a golf course at the edge of Pebble Beach and Stillwater Cove. The lodge burned down on December 17, 1917, while the course was under construction, and a completely different structure replaced it: the Del Monte Lodge. Hobart worked with Clarence Tantau to create a luxurious multi-story hotel, and Hobart designed a signature "Roman Plunge" pool to the east of the hotel. The golf course and the new lodge held a grand opening on February 22, 1919.
Hog-Morse
The American code was a little different to the International Morse Code currently in use. With the American code it is easier to make timing errors of this sort because there were several more symbol timings than there are in the international code. For instance, the international code has only two symbols, dots and dashes, but the American code has several lengths of dash. There is a distinction between "L" () and "T" (). Also, in the international code the space between symbols within a character is always the same, but American Morse has two different spaces. The letters "S" (), "C" (), and "R" () all consist of three dots, but the timing is different in each case.
Samuel Finley
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the developer of the telegraph and the namesake of Morse Code, was Finley's great-grandson via his daughter, Rebecca.
Morse code
Morse code is a character encoding scheme used in telecommunication that encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations called "dots" and "dashes" or "dits" and "dahs". Morse code is named for Samuel F. B. Morse, an inventor of the telegraph.
Alfred Vail
Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse collaborated in the invention of Morse code. A controversy exists over the role of each in the invention. The argument for Vail being the original inventor is laid out by several scholars.
Morse code
Morse code is transmitted using just two states (on and off). Historians have called it the first digital code. Morse code may be represented as a binary code, and that is what telegraph operators do when transmitting messages. Working from the above ITU definition and further defining a bit as a dot time, a Morse code sequence may be made from a combination of the following five bit-strings:Note that the marks and gaps alternate: dots and dashes are always separated by one of the gaps, and that the gaps are always separated by a dot or a dash.
Morse code
As of 2015, the United States Air Force still trains ten people a year in Morse. The United States Coast Guard has ceased all use of Morse code on the radio, and no longer monitors any radio frequencies for Morse code transmissions, including the international medium frequency (MF) distress frequency of 500 kHz. However, the Federal Communications Commission still grants commercial radiotelegraph operator licenses to applicants who pass its code and written tests. Licensees have reactivated the old California coastal Morse station KPH and regularly transmit from the site under either this Call sign or as KSM. Similarly, a few US Museum ship stations are operated by Morse enthusiasts.
Women in early radio
Women have been active participants in the development of radio (initially called "wireless") communications since its beginning. The age of radio communication began with the development of wireless telegraphy around 1900, in which Morse code could be transmitted over large distances using simple spark gap or carbon arc transmitting equipment, and various types of detectors for reception. Guglielmo Marconi achieved international fame in 1901 when he succeeded in sending a simple message in Morse code - the letter "s" - across the Atlantic from Cornwall in England to Newfoundland.
Hog-Morse
Hog-Morse was the tendency of inexperienced telegraph operators to make errors when sending or receiving in Morse code. It is so called after one example, "home" () becoming "hog" (), which is just a subtle error in timing. The term was current in the United States in the period when American Morse code was in use.
Morse code
Today among amateur operators there are several organizations that recognize high-speed code ability, one group consisting of those who can copy Morse at 60 wpm. Also, Certificates of Code Proficiency are issued by several amateur radio societies, including the American Radio Relay League. Their basic award starts at 10 wpm with endorsements as high as 40 wpm, and are available to anyone who can copy the transmitted text. Members of the Boy Scouts of America may put a Morse interpreter's strip on their uniforms if they meet the standards for translating code at 5 wpm.
Morse, Iowa
Morse was founded in 1871. The first settler was William Jayne. One of the founders was A.W.G. Morse, an early settler in Iowa, who kept journals which have been recently published by Cedar Creek Press. It was once a stop on the Burlington, Cedar Rapids and Northern Railway, later part of the CRI&P. It contains several houses and the Morse Community Club.
AVATAR (MUD)
DikuMUD was quickly followed by the creation of CopperMUD in June 1991. In December 1991, CopperMUD released its source code, leading to the creation of MercMUD on 18 December 1992. The final Merc codebase (version 2.2) was released on 24 November 1993, and this newer codebase was chosen by Farside MUD the following year due to the gameplay similarities with LPMUD.
Teleprinter
In 1835 Samuel Morse devised a recording telegraph, and Morse code was born.
Morse code
Morse can be sent by persons with severe motion disabilities, as long as they have some minimal motor control. An original solution to the problem that caretakers have to learn to decode has been an electronic typewriter with the codes written on the keys. Codes were sung by users; see the voice typewriter employing morse or votem, Newell and Nabarro, 1968.
Walkie-talkie
An unusual feature, common on children's walkie-talkies but seldom available otherwise even on amateur models, is a "code key", that is, a button allowing the operator to transmit Morse code or similar tones to another walkie-talkie operating on the same frequency. Generally the operator depresses the PTT button and taps out a message using a Morse Code crib sheet attached as a sticker to the radio. However, as Morse Code has fallen out of wide use outside amateur radio circles, some such units either have a grossly simplified code label or no longer provide a sticker at all.
Artie Moore
In the early hours of 15 April 1912, in the loft of the 17th century Gelligroes Mill, near Blackwood, Monmouthshire, Moore using crude radio apparatus received a faint signal in Morse Code:
Morse code
In aviation, pilots use radio navigation aids. To ensure that the stations the pilots are using are serviceable, the stations transmit a set of identification letters (usually a two-to-five-letter version of the station name) in Morse code. Station identification letters are shown on air navigation charts. For example, the VOR-DME based at Vilo Acuña Airport in Cayo Largo del Sur, Cuba is coded as "UCL", and UCL in Morse code is transmitted on its radio frequency. In some countries, during periods of maintenance, the facility may radiate a T-E-S-T code () or the code may be removed which tells pilots and navigators that the station is unreliable. In Canada, the identification is removed entirely to signify the navigation aid is not to be used. In the aviation service, Morse is typically sent at a very slow speed of about 5 words per minute. In the U.S., pilots do not actually have to know Morse to identify the transmitter because the dot/dash sequence is written out next to the transmitter's symbol on aeronautical charts. Some modern navigation receivers automatically translate the code into displayed letters.
American Morse code
American Morse Code was first used on the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line, a telegraph line constructed between Baltimore, Maryland, and the old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. The first public message "What hath God wrought" was sent on May 24, 1844, by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) "outer depot" (now the B&O Railroad Museum) in Baltimore. The message is a Bible verse from Numbers 23:23, chosen for Morse by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Governor of Connecticut. The original paper tape received by Vail in Baltimore is on display in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Tikker
In the early years of the 20th century, before modern AM or FM radio transmission was developed, radio transmitters communicated information by radiotelegraphy; the transmitter was switched off and on by the operator with a telegraph key, producing pulses of radio waves, to spell out text messages in Morse code. Around 1905 the first continuous wave radio transmitters began to replace the earlier spark transmitters. The Morse code signal of the spark transmitter consisted of pulses of radio waves called damped waves which repeated at an audio rate, so they were audible as a buzz or tone in a receiver's earphones. In contrast the new continuous wave transmitters produced a signal consisting of pulses of continuous waves, unmodulated sinusoidal carrier waves, which were inaudible in the earphones. So to receive this new modulation method, the receiver had to produce a tone during the pulses of carrier.
Samuel Finley Brown Morse
Samuel Finley Brown Morse was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of George Morse, a soldier in the American Civil War and later a lawyer in Massachusetts. Morse's distant cousin, Samuel Morse was the inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code. Morse attended Andover, like his father, and then Yale. At Yale, he was captain of the undefeated 1906 football team and member of the 1906 All-America Team. A member of Skull and Bones, he was voted Most Popular in the Yale University graduating class in 1907.
Prosigns for Morse code
The development of prosigns began in the 1860s for wired telegraphy. They are distinguished from common Morse abbreviations. Since Morse code communication preceded voice communications by several decades, many of the much older Morse prosigns have exact equivalent procedure "words" for use in the more recent radio telephony (voice).
American Morse code
In its original implementation, the Morse Code specification included the following:
Morse Institute Library
In 1808, the library began as a collection of about 100 books by Samuel Morse. He was a portrait artist and had an interest in developing a circulating library. By 1852, the collection, entitled the Citizen's Library, amassed 425 books. The Morse Institute Library was instituted in 1862 by Mary Ann Morse, Samuel Morse's granddaughter. Over the next several years, Mary Ann began the processes of raising funds and obtaining district approval. The collection opened to the public on December 25, 1873.
American Morse code
In the late 1890s, radio communication—initially known as "wireless telegraphy"—was invented, and used Morse Code transmissions. Most radio operators used the version of the Code that they were most familiar with—the American Morse Code in the United States, and Continental Morse in Europe. However, because of the long range of radio signals, a single international standard was needed, especially for seagoing vessels.
Alfred Vail
The argument offered by supporters of Morse claims that Morse originally devised a cipher code similar to that used in existing semaphore line telegraphs, by which words were assigned three- or four-digit numbers and entered into a codebook. The sending operator converted words to these number groups and the receiving operator converted them back to words using this codebook.
Arthur D. Morse
Arthur D. Morse (December 27, 1920 – June 1, 1971) was a World War II historian, best known for his book "While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy" (Random House, 1968). While there's a hefty amount of disagreement about the United States and Allied knowledge and actions during the Holocaust, this book features extensive documentation of the events of those years. Prior to this publication Morse was a producer for CBS Reports whose work included "Who Speaks for the South", "Clinton and the Law", and others. He replaced Fred W Friendly as executive producer. In 1969 helped found IBI (International Broadcast Institute) as executive director, originally headquartered in Rome. Morse died June 1, 1971 as a passenger in an auto accident while attending an IBI conference in Yugoslavia.
Radio in the United States
Radio communication — originally known as "wireless telegraphy" — was first developed in the 1890s, and the spark-gap transmitters initially employed could only transmit the dots-and-dashes of Morse code. Despite this limitation, in 1905 a small number of U.S. Navy stations inaugurated daily time signal broadcasts. In 1913 the high-powered station NAA in Arlington, Virginia began broadcasting daily time signals and weather reports in Morse code which covered much of the eastern United States.
Prosigns for Morse code
Many Morse code prosigns do not have written or printed textual character representations in the original source information, even if they do represent characters in other contexts. For example, when embedded in text the Morse code sequence represents the "double hyphen" character (normally "=", but also "– –"). When the same code appears alone it indicates the action of spacing down two lines on a page in order to create the white space indicating the start of a new paragraph or new section in a message heading. When used as a prosign, there is no actual written or printed character representation or symbol for a new paragraph (i.e. no symbol corresponding to "¶"), other than the two-line white space itself.