[NJARC] Good Story from Page 1 of Monday's Wall Street Journal

[john ruccolo]

Tapped out? Arizona retiree aims to write new chapter
for Morse code 

        NOSTALGIC FOR SIMPLER days, retired
astrophysicist Chuck Adams is
translating classics of boys’ literature into a
language he fears is going the
way of kit radios and marbles: Morse code.
        Holed up in his high-desert home crammed with
computers, radio receivers
and a very patient wife, Mr. Adams uses homemade
software to download online
books with expired copyrights, convert the typed words
into Morse code tones and
record them on compact discs he sells on the Internet.
        So far, Mr. Adams says he has sold or donated
thousands of Morse
versions of such novels as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “At
the Earth’s Core,” Daniel
Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” and H.G. Wells’s “The Time
Machine.” In about an hour
his software can take any book in the public domain
and turn it into a string of
digital dits and dahs; last weekend, he turned out a
version of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s - .... . / -... . .- ..- - .. ..-. ..-
.-.. / .- -. -.. / -.. .- --
-. . -.. (a.k.a., “The Beautiful and Damned”).
        For the 65-year-old Mr. Adams, it is a labor
of love, mixed with equal
parts hope and despair. “Morse code is going to die
off unless you can talk
someone into coming into the hobby,” he says.
        “I do it because it’s fun, and to keep it
going,” he says. Then he adds
in the next breath: “But I have no delusions of
grandeur that I can save Morse
code from extinction. I’m not Don Quixote. I’m not
going to go out and fight
windmills.”
        Mr. Adams grew up in Wink, a blink of a town
in West Texas. About two
meters tall himself, he shared a small bedroom with
his three younger brothers,
each of whom is even taller. He hand-built his first
bike with parts from a
junkyard and flew model rockets high above Wink while
the Soviets flew Sputnik
even higher.
        And, at the age of 15—inspired by his father,
a ham-radio operator—Mr.
Adams taught himself Morse code from a book. At the
time, ham operators had to
transcribe Morse code at a rate of five words per
minute in order to earn the
most basic federal license. Soon young Mr. Adams was
spending every night
sending coded messages to anyone who could hear them,
and eavesdropping on UPI
news dispatches broadcast to ships.
        Many other radio amateurs use voice
transmissions, but Mr. Adams
preferred code, because of the challenge—and because
he thinks his voice is too
high and his West Texas accent too twangy.
        Mr. Adams completed a Ph.D., won tenure at the
University of North
Texas, worked high-powered jobs in the defense and
computer industries, and
dabbled in the professional poker circuit. But he
never lost his love for Morse
code.
        The code is the creation of a painter, Samuel
F.B. Morse, who needed a
way to transmit messages over the telegraph that he
and Alfred Vail had
invented. In 1844, the men famously sent a
transmission from Washington to
Baltimore that read, “What hath God wrought?”
        The telegraph soon replaced the pony express.
As late as World War II,
ham operators found themselves using their Morse
skills as radiomen in the
military. During the Vietnam War, Jeremiah Denton, a
prisoner of war who later
became a U.S. senator from Alabama, blinked
“T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code when
his captors put him on television.
        But over time, the telephone and satellites
have rendered Morse code
almost obsolete. “If the satellites go out and power
goes out, Morse code can
still get through,” says Nancy Kott, president of a
code club called
FISTS—someone who sends good code has “a good fist.”
“All we need is a battery
and two wires to tap together, and we can
communicate.”
        In February, the Federal Communications
Commission eliminated the Morse
requirements for ham-radio licenses. Mr. Adams
resigned from a ham-operators
organization because of what he saw as its flaccid
defense of Morse code.
        “It is a sad state of affairs when the U.S.
doesn’t even attempt to keep
the language alive or give an incentive to work on
it,” says Mr. Adams.
        Many of those who still know Morse code test
their skills with a German
computer game called Rufz, the standard for
determining world
transcription-speed rankings. Players listen to coded,
five-character call
signs, combinations of letters, symbols and numbers
that identify individual
license holders. The faster and more correctly they
type them, the more points
they score. (Transcribing regular text is much
slower.)
        Last month in Belgrade, Goran Hajosevic broke
200 words per minute—an
extraordinary pace. Mr. Adams is tied for eighth in
the world, at more than 140
words per minute.
        Scanning the list recently of the 60 fastest
Morse coders under the age
of 20, Mr. Adams spotted just two with American-issued
call signs. “What this
shows me is in the United States, we have no one who’s
interested in learning
Morse code anymore,” he lamented.
        Mr. Adams and other Morse aficionados don’t
speak of dots and dashes;
that imagery is too visual, and Morse is an aural
language. So they prefer to
describe the language in dits and dahs, the sounds of
the short and long tones.
A, for instance, is dit dah. B is dah dit dit dit, or
simply dah dididit.
Between two letters, the sender allows a three-dit
silence. Between words it
grows to seven dits.
        Like all Morse experts, Mr. Adams rarely
breaks signals down into
letters, instead hearing complete words much as
readers recognize words on a
page. When he transcribes a message at high speeds,
his fingers are five or 10
words behind his ears. When he is “in the zone” he
isn’t even conscious of what
he is transcribing, he says. He has to read it later
to understand the message.
        When he listens to one of his books, the code
is like a voice speaking
to him. “It’s like you don’t count the i’s when
someone says Mississippi,” he
explains.
        He produces his audio books to play at
different speeds, depending on
the expertise of the buyer. Ken Moorman’s bedtime
listening is Mr. Adams’s
25-word-per-minute version of “The War of the Worlds,”
which he purchased for
$10.50. “It’s so much easier to pick up a microphone
and yell,” says Mr.
Moorman, a 65-year-old retired electrical engineer in
Williamsburg, Virginia,
and a coder since 1957. “The people who do [Morse
code] today do it because it’s
a lost art.”
        Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent Barry
Kutner, a 50-year-old
ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pennsylvania, and
another world-class coder, a
100-words-per-minute version of the book. To Mr.
Adams’s chagrin, Mr. Kutner
wrote an email back pointing out that the gap between
words was eight dits long,
instead of the prescribed seven. At that pace, a dit
lasts 1.2 one-thousandths
of a second.
        Much as he did growing up in Texas, Mr. Adams
enjoys sitting in front of
a gray radio, not much bigger than a hardcover book,
and sending code with a
$500, Italian, stainless-steel, paddle-style key that
he operates with a
pinching motion. With the slightest touch of his right
thumb on one paddle, the
key sends an audible dit, or short tone. A touch of
his right pointer finger on
the other paddle sends a dah, or long tone.
        His wife, Phyllis, 62, doesn’t begrudge him
his long hours in front of
the radio. “I’m just glad he has something to keep him
busy,” she says. “All my
friends with retired husbands complain they follow
them around the house all
day.”
        One recent Sunday morning, Mr. Adams’s radio
came alive with Morse
tones. It was a guy named Gary McClain in Pryor,
Oklahoma. The transmissions
were pretty slow, just 22 words per minute.
        Mr. McClain, a 65-year-old retired mill
worker, learned Morse code in
the Boy Scouts half a century ago. He had nothing
urgent in mind; he just wanted
to make contact with someone far away.
        “Weather here is cloudy and chance of
showers,” he tapped, as Mr. Adams
transcribed the words in a notebook.
        Mr. McClain signed off, and the radio went
silent. “It will eventually
die,” Mr. Adams mused. “I’ll hate to see it go. I
won’t have anybody to talk to.
I’ll have to go back to reading.”               

-end-


       
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