The Morse Code

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 25, 31 December 1931, Page 29

The Morse Code

Nearing Its Centenary a otetneeeieneeeett FEW present-day listeners are suthciently interested in the Morse code to take the trouble to learn it. Perhaps, too, they. are wise in their generation, for the mastering of Morse necessitates the expenditure of no little time and mental energy. The Morse code is universally used and understood. Itis, also, getting well on toward its centenary, and perhaps the surprising fact about it is that it has never been superseded to any extent by any other system. Nowadays, a large proportion of commercial wireless traffie is conducted through the agency of Morse, and particularly through more or less mechanical systems whereby the code is transmitted at very high speeds. Before Samuel F. B. Morse broyght out his famous code, comprising a ¢conr bination of two sounds varying in duration, crude telegraphic messages were transmitted and received by means of needle instruments, the deflections of one or more needles to one side or the

other of an instrument dial making up a code of readable signals. Morse, however, who started out in life not as a scientist, but as a portrait and scenic painter, gave to the world 2 new telegraphic instrument — his famous "Sounder’-in which a bar was attracted to and released by an electro-magnet. It was the noisés which this alternate attraction and liberation of the moyable bar gaye rise 9 which stirred up in the mind of its inventor the idea of constructing a code based on sound instead of on sight. It is, indeed, a tribute to Morse’s : ingenuity that the Morse code of the present day is so little altered from the original code. Morse’s code was subjected to Internafional revision in 1851, since which time it has remained unchanged,