[QCWA] Re: History of Morse Code
Jeffrey D Angus
jangus at socal.rr.com
Tue Aug 26 12:41:10 EDT 2008
Bob Burchett wrote:
>
>
>
> A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TELEGRAPH
>
> This is interesting and I learned a couple of things from
> this. Note the ( ) sections where he graphically represents the
> "dots & dashes" and pay attention to the "spaces" between the
> characters; they are important to those of us who "copy the code".
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) was born in Charleston,
> Massachusetts. He was talented as an artist in his youth. He
> studied art, mathematics and science at Yale College. He considered
> electrical and chemical studies "instructive and amusing." He
> graduated from Yale College in 1810 and decided to devote himself
> to the study of art and he went to London in 1811 to study art
> there. By 1815 he had become recognized as an artist of
> considerable talent in England and returned to the United States.
> By 1825 he was also quite well known as a successful artist in this
> country.
> In 1825 he returned to Europe for further study and stayed
> three years. On his return trip to the United States in 1832,
> during dinner conversations with a fellow passenger on the SS
> Sully, he became interested in science again upon learning what he
> considered to be a very astounding fact: that electrical impulses
> (on and off conditions) apparently traveled instantaneously (as far
> as then could be determined) over any known length of wire. From
> that time on Morse could think of nothing else but how to put that
> phenomenon to use as a means of communication. He completely
> abandoned his career in art, except for teaching, (to gain his
> living) in favor of developing the "telegraph" -- a means of
> "writing" at a distance.
> He arrived home from his 1832 voyage aboard the SS Sully
> without funds. His brothers, Sidney and Richard gave him a room on
> the top floor of a building they owned. There he lived and
> developed his ideas about how to build the telegraph. He took a job
> at the, then new, University of New York teaching art. It was a
> poor-paying job and he spent all the money he could get his hands
> on to work on his invention. One of his fellow professors, Leonard
> D. Gale, became interested and helped him.
> In those days one could not buy insulated magnet wire as we
> have today. He and any help he could get had to wrap the bare wire
> with cotton thread for insulation, by hand, of course! They had a
> crude working model by 1837, but investors found it interesting,
> even amusing but wouldn't invest in it. This may have been due to
> the "code" system that he proposed using -- more on that later. One
> person watching the demonstration of this first, crude model was a
> young student, Alfred Vail. His father and brother were owners of
> an iron and brass works in Speedwell, New Jersey. Vail offered to
> manufacture a sturdier, more practical set of "instruments" for the
> telegraph. He thereby became a partner with Morse with a quarter
> interest in the invention. The story has been told that not only
> did Vail contribute to the success of the hardware, but that he had
> a hand in developing the two versions of the "Morse code" as well.
> In 1838 Morse tried to get Congress interested in funding a
> trial run of the telegraph but Congress refused funding for it. He
> then went to Europe in 1840 and got no help there from either
> France or England. Back in the U.S. he made an attempt to
> demonstrate his invention publicly in 1842. He had a specially made
> waterproofed cable laid under water from the Battery in lower
> Manhattan to Governor's Island, just off the southern tip of
> Manhattan. The newspapers carried an announcement of the
> demonstration and there was a crowd of on-lookers present and all
> was ready to go, when a ship dropped anchor right over the cable
> and broke it before the demonstration could get underway. The crowd
> went away angry, saying it was all a hoax.
> Finally at the end of its session in 1843, Congress passed a
> bill appropriating $30,000 to test the telegraph. A wire was strung
> from the Capitol Building in Washington to the City of Baltimore,
> Maryland. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent the now famous message: "WHAT
> HATH GOD WROUGHT" [.-- .... .- - .... .- - .... --.
> . . -.. .-- . .. . . ..- --. .... -] over that wire.
> After that, Morse and his telegraph quickly became famous
> throughout North America and Europe.
> Morse's original concept was not based upon the idea that
> anyone could learn to read the code by ear. His machine was
> designed to make marks on a moving paper tape in response to opens
> and closures of the circuit made on the sending end of the line.
> These marks he called "dots." According to his early plans (the
> 1837 model, no doubt) these dots would represent the numerals 0
> through 9. [Note that this is similar to the system used in many
> municipal fire-alarm box setups used to this day] Messages,
> according to this concept, would then be composed of 5- or 6-digit
> numerals to identify words taken from a dictionary where each word
> in the language would be identified by a number. The receiving
> operator would read the numbers off the tape and look up their
> meanings in a copy of that dictionary. Vail, it is said, was the
> one who dissuaded Morse from that idea in favor of a code where
> each letter would be represented by a unique combination of "dots"
> and "dashes" -- the latter just a longer mark on the tape. It is
> quite possible also that it was Vail and not Morse who designed
> that code which now bears Morse's name. The first version of the
> code was like that of our International Morse code as used today,
> but without numerals or punctuation. It is not clear how that
> version was exported to Europe: perhaps in Morse's unsuccessful
> "sales" trip to France and England in 1840. But it is certain that
> when the telegraph began to be used in Europe, that was the version
> that they used from the very beginning and it became known as the
> Continental Morse Code. The numerals and punctuation were
> apparently added there, also.
> Before the 1844 successful demonstration a different version
> of the Morse Code was developed, possibly by Vail, but that is not
>
> certain. In this newer version the letters were represented by
> combinations of dots, dashes and spaces. This version was somewhat
> faster than the original version. It is the one that Morse used in
> his 1844 demonstration message. That version was used on all
> telegraph lines in the United States and later in Central and South
> America and it became known as the American Morse Code. At this
> point I would like to dispel a common notion among radio folks:
> that there is some reason that the American Morse, the landline
> code, can only be used on a sounder and the Continental Morse (now
> the International Morse Code) can only be used with on-and-off
> tones. This is not the case, either code can be used for either
> mode.
> As I stated before, Morse had no idea that operators could
> learn to read (and make copy) of these dot-and-dash signals by ear.
> It was only after the tape machines had been in use for some time
> that it was found that the operators were writing the messages by
> sound rather than reading the marks off the tape, reading the
> clicks of the receiving apparatus by ear! Soon a device called a
> sounder became the receiving device of choice in place of the
> moving tape machines that Morse and his associates had labored so
> long to perfect.
> To the untrained ear the telegraph sounder makes only a series
> of oddly spaced clicks and clacks, however, the skilled operator
> can easily distinguish between the "down-click" and the "up-clack"
> and thereby sense the length of the bit to determine whether it be
> a dot or a dash (or a long dash).
> In the telegraph's heyday a skilled operator could make copy
> on a "mill" (typewriter) at 40 WPM or better, right through the
> noise those old mechanical typewriters made themselves. In
> addition, by using Phillip's Code (a set of abbreviations developed
> for that purpose) actual speeds up to well over 55 WPM were
> commonly achieved. When using the Phillip's Code the receiving
> operator would "fill" the text, that is he would spell out the
> words in full that came over the wire in abbreviated form. This
> mode was used by the various news-wire services in sending "press."
> (news items) The public-correspondence telegraph companies, such as
> Western Union and Postal Telegraph, however, spelled everything out
> in full in the texts of messages, including numerals and
> punctuation, a practice continued to this day in amateur-radio
> message handling.
> When "wireless" came along some 60 years after the invention
> of the landline version, American Morse was used in the United
> States at first and the Continental Morse was used in Europe.
> Wireless signals (radio, of course) were generated almost
> exclusively by some form of spark-gap generator and those spark
> signals greatly resembled natural noise, especially atmospheric
> static (QRN). It was found that the American version of the code
> with its spaces within some letters was more difficult to copy in
> the presence of atmospherics. Actually, I believe there was a lot
> more to it than that, but none-the-less it was decided that the
> Continental version of the code did a better job on wireless than
> the American (land-line) version and so almost all wireless was
> carried on via the Continental Morse code. This happened well
> before the advent of continuous-wave type signals generated by
> vacuum tubes, that later were used in the first successful amateur
> trans-atlantic QSOs in the early 20's. It has been the only aurally
> copied code used for manual radio telegraphy since that time,
> except for a few American-Morse buffs who use that code regularly
> on 80 meter CW. Yes, it's legal for U.S. amateur use, provided the
> station ID (callsign) is sent in International Morse, that being
> the name by which the Continental Code has been called since
> sometime in the early 30's.
> Some of the things we do or say today in ham radio have their
> origins in landline telegraphy customs and jargon. Laughter in
> American Morse was HO (.... . .) this has led to our rather silly
> HI (.... ..) in hamdom, (omitting the internal space of the Morse
> letter O). Despite some sources' claim that our rather widely used
> OK (or okay) came into use during the presidency of Martin
> VanBuren, (1782-1862) as an abbreviation of his nickname,"Old
> Kindernook," I strongly dispute that, it was strictly a telegraphic
> signal and was not an abbreviation for anything. No, "OK" was
> strictly a telegraph prosign, to use the modern designation. The
> signal UA (..- .-) was used as a question, much as we use "OK?"
> today, and the affirmative answer was OK (. . -.-).
> Because of the existence of such number signals as 73 and 88,
> one might imagine that there was a whole list of such signals in
> general use, but I can find none. Oh, there were number signals
> used but in general they were private codes used within certain
> systems and none of wide-spread use. The signal 73 (--.. ...-.)
> was originated by a veteran telegrapher, James Douglas Reid, who
> called it the "symbol of fraternity," not "best regards," as it is
> now generally accepted to mean. The signal 88, has no such history
> in telegraphy, being strictly of later, ham-radio origin. The
> signal 30 (...-. ___) was used on press circuits to indicate "end
> of article." This has been carried over into general radio
> practice, including ham radio, as the signal SK (...-.-), "end of
> work".
> The character (. ...) is American Morse for the ampersand (&)
> and it is still used today in ham radio, but the space in that one
> makes it come out "ES" in the International code. The American
> Morse for comma (,) is (.-.-) and we still use that in CW message
> handling for the separation between lines in the address. Also
> landline Morse for zero is the long dash (___) but our modern
> electronic keyers won't make the long dash, so we frequently hear
> zero being sent as (-), which comes out T. So general was the
> practice in the earlier CW days, of sending the zero as a long
> dash, that when the tenth, or zero, call area was initiated by the
> FCC after World War 2, they saw fit to mention in the regulations
> that the zero in the callsign must be sent (-----) and not (___).
> I hope everybody enjoys reading this as much as I have enjoyed
> putting it into print.
> ADDENDUM
>
> For those not familiar with the American Morse (landline)
> Code, here is a tabulation of that system.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> A .- N -. 1 .--. & . ...
> B -... O . . 2 ..-.. / ..--
> C .. . P ..... 3 ...-. ! ---.
> D -.. Q ..-. 4 ....- : -.- . .
> E . R . .. 5 --- ; ... ..
> F .-. S ... 6 ......
> G --. T - 7 --..
> H .... U ..- 8 -....
> I .. V ...- 9 -..-
> J -.-. W .-- 0 very long dash
> K -.- X .-.. period ..--..
> L long dash Y .. .. comma .-.-
> M -- Z ... . ? -..-.
>
>
> And for those not familiar with the original Continental Morse
> Code here is a tabulation of that system. Now called International
> Morse.
> _________________________________________________________________
> A .- N -. 1 .---- & . ...
> B -... O --- 2 ..--- / -..-.
> C -.-. P .--. 3 ...-- : ---...
> D -.. Q --.- 4 ....- ; -.-.-.
> E . R .-. 5 ..... Ä .-.-
> F ..-. S ... 6 -.... É ..--
> G --. T - 7 --... Ö ---.
> H .... U ..- 8 ---.. Ñ --.--
> I .. V ...- 9 ----. Ü ..--
> J .--- V ...- 0 ----- apostrophe
> K -.- W .-- period .-.-.- .----.
> L .-.. X -..- comma --..--
> M -- Y -.-- ? ..--..
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Written by
> J. Harvey Chase W4TG
> Posted on net by
> Chas.McCook K4YC
>
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