Morse code: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:56, 24 August 2025

Latest revision as of 10:24, 25 August 2025

Line 34:

The American artist [[Samuel F. B. Morse|Samuel Morse]], the American [[physicist]] [[Joseph Henry]], and mechanical engineer [[Alfred Vail]] developed an [[electrical telegraph]] system. The simple "on or off" nature of its signals made it desirable to find a method of transmitting natural language using only electrical pulses and the silence between them. Around 1837, Morse therefore developed such a method, an early forerunner to the modern International Morse code.<ref name=Burns-2004/>{{rp|page=79}}

The Morse system for [[telegraphy]], which was first used in about 1844, was designed to make indentations on a paper tape when electric currents were received.<ref>{{cncite web |author=André Twigt and Henny de Boer |date=June19 August 2025 |title=Materieel van toen: de seinsleutel |url=https://magazines.defensie.nl/materieelgezien/2025/06/materieel-van-toen-seinsleutel |website=Materieelgezien |publisher=Defensie.nl |language=Dutch}}</ref> Morse's original telegraph receiver used a mechanical clockwork to move a paper tape. When an electrical current was received, an electromagnet engaged an armature that pushed a stylus onto the moving paper tape, making an indentation on the tape. When the current was interrupted, a spring retracted the stylus and that portion of the moving tape remained unmarked.

In his earliest design for a code, Morse had planned to transmit only numerals, and to use a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by [[Alfred Vail]] in 1840 to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail estimated the [[letter frequency]] of English by counting the [[movable type]] he found in the [[Type case|type cases]] of a local newspaper in [[Morristown, New Jersey]].<ref name=Burns-2004/>{{rp|page=84}} The shorter marks were called "dots" and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shortest sequences of dots and dashes. This code, first used in 1844, was what later became known as ''Morse landline code'', ''[[American Morse code]]'', or ''Railroad Morse'', until the end of railroad telegraphy in the U.S. in the 1970s.{{citation needed|date=May 2021}}