[GreenKeys] Seattle Western Union History

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Richard Schumann wrote:

> Anybody know the circumstances under which American Morse was phased out for 
> the Morse we are familiar with today, and how Teletype figured in to all 
> this?  Maybe some kind of website with a timeline showing how the different 
> methods overlapped?  There must have been some real conflicts among those who 
> resisted change.
>
I don't have a timeline for you, but here is how it went, as I understand
it.

The original Morse code, which we call American Morse, was actually
developed by Morse's collaborator Alfred Vail.  It was used pretty
much unchanged from the early days of the telegraph through the very
end of land-line telegraphy in the U.S.  The very end was more or
less in the railroad business.  Western Union switched to teleprinters
early, because telegraphy was the backbone of their business and
teleprinters were faster than manual Morse and took less training
to use.  Of course there were some old W.U. people who knew Morse
long after teleprinters came into use, and they continued to use Morse
occasionally, for things like wire maintenance and for communication
with railroads.  The railroads hung onto manual Morse for a lot of
their operations because transmitting messages was not the backbone
of their business, but merely a tool of it.  They didn't have enough
traffic to need the speed of teleprinters, and they didn't want to
spend money on teleprinters and their maintenance when Morse equipment
was cheap and simple and worked well enough.  (Though for some parts
of their operation the railroads did make good use of teleprinters;
but out along the line there was a lot of Morse used until about
1968.  And the manual Morse was replaced not by teleprinters but
by telephones, and now by radio.)

The Morse code that we know from ham radio was called Continental
Morse, meaning the Continent of Europe.  So presumably the Europeans
in adapting telegraphy to their needs decided that the code should
be changed somewhat - and probably they added characters to the code
for things that are in some languages but not in English.  I suspect
the French would do that sort of thing - they always wanted to do
things their own way anyway.

Then when radio came into the picture there was some use of American
Morse by U.S. stations, but there was a need to have a common code
for all the ships at sea regardless of their nationality, so the
Continental code was adopted and called the International Morse code.
Around the same time the Q signals were developed both for brevity
and to have a language-independent system of communication.  That is,
U.S. and French and German wireless operators, for example, didn't have
to know one another's languages because just about everything they
needed to say could be expressed in Q signals.

So the American Morse was not phased out so much as it went its own
way with the wire lines and clicking sounders, while the International
Morse code came into use for radio.