American Morse Code
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American Morse Code — also known as Railroad Morse—is the latter-day name for the original version of the
Morse Code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...
developed in the mid-1840s, by
Samuel Morse Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...
and
Alfred Vail Alfred Lewis Vail (September 25, 1807 – January 18, 1859) was an American machinist and inventor. Along with Samuel Morse, Vail was central in developing and commercializing American telegraphy between 1837 and 1844. Vail and Morse were the f ...
for their
electric telegraph Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...
. The "American" qualifier was added because, after most of the rest of the world adopted "
International Morse Code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...
," the companies that continued to use the original Morse Code were mainly located in the United States. American Morse is now nearly extinct—it is most frequently seen in American railroad museums and
American Civil War reenactment American Civil War reenactment is an effort to recreate the appearance of a particular battle or other event associated with the American Civil War by hobbyists known (in the United States) as Civil War reenactors, or living historians. Althoug ...
s—and "Morse Code" today virtually always means the International Morse which supplanted American Morse.


History

American Morse Code was first used on the Baltimore-Washington telegraph line, a telegraph line constructed between
Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
,
Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...
, and the old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol building in
Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
The first public message "
What hath God wrought "What hath God wrought" is a translation of a phrase from the Book of Numbers (Numbers 23:23), and may refer to: *"What hath God wrought", the official first Morse code message transmitted in the US on May 24, 1844, to officially open the Baltimor ...
" was sent on May 24, 1844, by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first common carrier railroad and the oldest railroad in the United States, with its first section opening in 1830. Merchants from Baltimore, which had benefited to some extent from the construction of ...
(B&O) "outer depot" (now the
B&O Railroad Museum The B&O Railroad Museum is a museum and historic railway station exhibiting historic railroad equipment in Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) company originally opened the museum on July 4, 1953, with the name of the Balti ...
) in Baltimore. The message is a
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verse from
Numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
23:23, chosen for Morse by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Governor of Connecticut. The original paper tape received by Vail in Baltimore is on display in the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
in Washington, D.C. In its original implementation, the Morse Code specification included the following: # short mark or dot () # longer mark or dash () # intra-character gap (standard gap between the dots and dashes in a character) # short gap (between letters) # medium gap (between words) # long gap (between sentences) # long intra-character gap (longer internal gap used in C, O, R, Y, Z and &) # "long dash" (, the letter L) # even longer dash (, the numeral 0) Various other companies and countries soon developed their own variations of the original Morse Code. Of special importance was one standard, originally created in Germany by
Friedrich Clemens Gerke Friedrich Clemens Gerke (22 January 1801 – 21 May 1888) was a German writer, journalist, musician and pioneer of telegraphy who revised the Morse code in 1848. It is Gerke's version of the original (American) Morse code now known as the Interna ...
in 1848, which was simpler—it eliminated the long intra-character spaces and the two long dashes—but also included changes in the sequences for eleven of the letters and most of the numerals. The Gerke code had a distinct advantage for use on undersea telegraph cables. Cables suffer from a type of distortion called
dispersion Dispersion may refer to: Economics and finance *Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns *Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item *Wage dispersion, the amount of variatio ...
that gets progressively worse with the length of the cable. Dispersion severely limits the rate that Morse can be sent because of
intersymbol interference In telecommunication, intersymbol interference (ISI) is a form of distortion of a signal in which one symbol interferes with subsequent symbols. This is an unwanted phenomenon as the previous symbols have a similar effect as noise, thus making ...
. For instance, the first
transatlantic telegraph cable Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data a ...
of 1858 could only sustain a transmission rate of less than 1 word per minute. This interference is worse with American Morse because it has a greater proportion of closely spaced dots than the Gerke code.Coe, p. 69 The Gerke code was adopted as a standard for transmission over cables by the Austro-German Telegraph Union (which included many central European states) at a conference in 1851. It was necessary to have a common code as the Union had also agreed to direct connection of cables across borders (as opposed to recoding and retransmission by an operator). The code was adopted as the European standard in 1865, and was known at first as "Continental Morse," although as its use spread it also became known as "International Morse." At this point the original Morse Code started to be called American Morse, to differentiate between the two main standards. There was some resistance to adopting International Morse in the US. This resulted in international Morse operators in the US needing to be proficient in both codes since messages on transatlantic cables were in the international code, and incoming messages needed to be recoded and sent on in American Morse. An attempt in 1854 to make International Morse the standard within the US was rejected by the telegraph companies. Overhead wires, used for most land routes in the US, have nowhere near as big a problem with dispersion as undersea or underground cables, and the companies had no wish to retrain their staff. The Chilean telegraph regulation of 1872 required operators to know both "German and American" code; some lines with the state system seem to have generally used one, some the other (and a few lines had Wheatstone equipment and so did not use Morse Code at all). In the late 1890s, radio communication—initially known as "
wireless telegraphy Wireless telegraphy or radiotelegraphy is transmission of text messages by radio waves, analogous to electrical telegraphy using cables. Before about 1910, the term ''wireless telegraphy'' was also used for other experimental technologies for ...
"—was invented, and used Morse Code transmissions. Most radio operators used the version of the Code that they were most familiar with—the American Morse Code in the United States, and Continental Morse in Europe. However, because of the long range of radio signals, a single international standard was needed, especially for seagoing vessels. At the Radiotelegraphic Convention meeting in London in 1912, the section of the Convention covering "Transmission of Radiograms" included the statement that "The signals to be employed are those of Morse International Code." Even after this, the original Morse Code continued to be used throughout much of the United States. American Morse remained the standard for U.S. landline telegraph companies, including the dominant company,
Western Union The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
, in part because the original code, with fewer dashes, could be sent about 5% faster than International Morse. American Morse also was commonly used for domestic radio transmissions on the
Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...
, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. However, International Morse predominated for ocean-going vessels, and many U.S. shipboard operators became skilled in transmitting both versions of the Code as needed.


Advantages and disadvantages

As already mentioned, American Morse is less suitable for use on cables because of the high density of dots. However, this same feature, together with the shorter dash, leads to the advantage of a more compressed code and a faster sending rate. The same operator could send at least 20% faster with American Morse than with International Morse.Coe, p. 70 The greater complexity of American Morse meant that it was easier for operators to make errors. American Morse has multiple lengths of dashes and spaces and inadvertently transmitting the wrong ones and other timing errors by novice operators is known as
hog-Morse Hog-Morse was telegraphers' jargon for the tendency of inexperienced telegraph operators to make errors when sending or receiving in Morse code. The term was current in the United States during the period when American Morse code was still in use. ...
.


Later developments

Over time, with the disappearance of landline telegraphy and the end of commercial radio use of Morse Code, American Morse has become nearly extinct. In the United States, the ranks of amateur radio operators used to include many active and retired commercial landline telegraph operators, who preferred to use American Morse for their amateur radio transmissions, so the CW (continuous wave) amateur bands used to have a mixture of American and International Morse. However, today even U.S. amateurs use International Morse almost exclusively.


Comparison of American and International Morse


Common punctuation


Notes


References


Bibliography

* Chesnoy, Jose, ''Undersea Fiber Communication Systems'', Academic Press, 2002 . * Coe, Lewis, ''The Telegraph: A History of Morse's Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States'', McFarland, 2003 . * Lyall, Francis, ''International Communications: The International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union'', Routledge, 2016 . * Als
available in PDF


External links



* ttp://tinfoil.com/cm-0406.htm ''Circa'' 1910 recording of an American Morse radio transmissionbr>Morse Telegraph Club, Inc.The Dot and Line Alphabet
a sketch from
Edward Everett Hale Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author, historian, and Unitarian minister, best known for his writings such as "The Man Without a Country", published in ''Atlantic Monthly'', in support of the Union dur ...
about (American) Morse code, first published 1858
Morse Code Sounder
Allows conversion and sounding of American Morse {{Morse code Morse code 1844 introductions