Morse Code: A Universal Means Of Communication

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Morse Code is named after painter and founder of the National Academy of Design, Samuel F. B. Morse, who lived from 1791 to 1872. He, along with Alfred Vail, a machinist and inventor, and the physicist Joseph Henry developed the electromagnetic telegraph along with the code that assigns a set of dots and dashes or short and long pulses to each letter of the English alphabet. The first telegraph that successfully worked was produced in 1836 and made transmissions and communication possible over any distance. The first Morse Code message was "What hath God wrought?" and was sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. Morse Code is still used today in the military as a way of communication during harsh conditions due to universal means of communication. Experienced operators can copy text they received without the need to write what they receive, and when transmitting, they can easily converse at 20 to 30 words per minute. Morse Code can be conveyed using sound or light, which sometimes happens between ships at sea using lights. In emergencies, people use Morse Code to transmit distress signals when there is no other option. The standard international distress signal is ...---... (SOS). Since December 2003, Morse Code has even included the “@” symbol and it is a combination of a and c “.--.-.”. This is the first …show more content…

For languages not written with the Latin alphabet, other versions of Morse Code are used. There exists versions of Morse Code for the Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. The Japanese Morse Code, known as Wabun Code, matches katakana syllables to specific codes like ア A “--.--”. The Chinese telegraph code maps Chinese characters to four-digit codes and then those digits are sent using standard Morse code. Korean Morse code uses the Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System, which was originally developed to allow the Korean language to be typed on western

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