[CW] A race to the wire as old hand at Morse code beats txt msgrs

[Donald Chester]

>From the Times in the U.K.

By Mark Henderson
April 16, 2005

DOTTY and old-fashioned means of communication can still be the best: Morse 
code has seen off the challenge of the text message in a contest pitting the 
best in 19th-century technology against its 21st-century successor.

The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was 
won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out 
using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was 
the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997.

Gordon Hill, who learnt to use the technique in 1927 when he joined the 
Australian Post Office, easily defeated his 13-year-old rival, Brittany 
Devlin, who was armed with a mobile phone and a rich vocabulary of text 
message shorthand. Mr Hill, whose messages were transcribed by another 
telegraph veteran, Jack Gibson, 82, then repeated the feat against three 
other children and teenagers with mobile phones.

In the competition, at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Mr Hill and his 
rivals were asked to transmit a line selected at random from an 
advertisement in a teenage magazine.

It read: “Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them 
where you are going and what you are wearing.” While the telegraphist tapped 
out the line in full, to be deciphered by Mr Gibson, Miss Devlin employed 
text slang to save time. She keyed: “hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel 
them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing.”

Just 90 seconds after Mr Hill began transmitting, Mr Gibson announced that 
he had the message received and written down correctly. It took another 18 
seconds for Miss Devlin’s message to reach the mobile phone belonging to her 
friend. Mr Hill said that he was impressed by modern technology, even though 
his clunky telegraph machine emerged on top in three further contests. Text 
messaging, he said, had even been predicted by one of his colleagues in 
1961.

“An engineer told me the day would come when we would be able to send 
messages without wires,” he said. Miss Devlin said that she had two years of 
texting experience. “I send about three messages a day,” she said. “I used 
to send lots more but I ran out of credit.”