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The morse code

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) was the founder of the National Academy of Design and a skilled painter (se his self-portrait on the right). In 1832, while on a ship returning from Europe, he conceived the idea of an electromagnetic telegraph. Experiments resulted in a demonstration of a working telegraph set in 1836. The historic message, "What hath God wrought?" was successfully sent from Washington to Baltimore.

The electric telegraph, as designed by Samuel Morse was basically an electrical circuit consisting of a battery, a key, and an electromagnet, all connected by wire. The electromagnet had a pencil attached to it, which moved and made a mark on a paper tape whenever an electric current passed through it. The marks were long or short, depending on the amount of time the key was held down. A unique pattern was assigned to each character of the alphabet, as well as to the numerals an punctuation marks.

The Morse code used in those days differed greatly from that which we use today: the original users did not listen to tones but instead to the clicking sounds created by sounders. They used the American Morse as opposed to today's International Morse Code. When sending a dahs, the user simply sent two rapid dits.

There are two symbols used to represent letters in today's morse code, called dots and dashes or dits and dahs. The length of the dit determines the speed at which the message is sent, and is used as the timing reference. A dah is conventionally 3 times as long as a dit and spacing between dahs and dits in a character is the length of one dit. Spacing between letters in a word is the length of a dah. Spacing between words is 7 dots.