About Morse Code

I first heard Morse code as a five year-old boy while waiting for a tram outside a Sydney post office. I was fascinated by the sound and pestered my mother to explain it to me. She tried her best but I don't think I really understood what it all meant.

It was to be another ten years before I began to learn and work with Morse myself. Unfortunately it was a poor career choice—eight years later the Australian post office dropped Morse in favour of an automated teleprinter switching system. Like most other former telegraphists I maintained my love for the work and, like them, can still read the code after a break of forty-five years.

This is not intended to be an information piece about the history and development of the Overland Telegraph. In keeping with the rest of Tomorrowland   it's more a collection of yarns and anecdotes about the people I met and stories I heard when I worked with Morse Code.

Morse Code was developed by Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872). A professor of arts and design at New York University he realised that using pulses of current (by making and breaking a connection) could operate an electromagnet which in turn could move a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper. This was the origin of his Morse Code.

The message, "What hath God wrought" was transmitted from Washington DC to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. It was the first official message ever sent on a telegraph line.

We're so used to associating Morse Code with sound that it will surprise many to learn that Morse's original system was completely visual. It recorded dots and dashes on a paper tape. This phase was brief because it didn't take long before operators manning the equipment realised they could read the gaps between the clicks of the sounder much more quickly than they could translate it by hand from the written record.

Training was provided to teach people how to read the sounds and a century of telegraphy commenced.