Morse Code And Telegraph Essay

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The Story behind the Morse code and Telegraph SOS, is an internationally recognized distress signal, is not an abbreviation for any certain word, but instead, the letters were chosen because they are easy to transmit in Morse code: "S" is three dots, and "O" is three dashes (History.com, 2009). “While Samuel Morse was travelling through Europe he observed the French device called the “semaphore,”. It was an “early telegraph system that communicated optically by way of windmill-like towers with adjustable arms (DEV, 2017)”. The devices were constructed all over France in the 18th and 19th centuries and used primarily for national and military communications. The semaphore towers had a distance between them of approximately six miles. The devices worked by moving their arms to a position that could be recognized to match a letter or character in the French alphabet. “Messengers manning each station would read each message by telescope and pass it along to the next station, making communication …show more content…

The Morse code worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. The code assigned letters and numbers a set of dots and dashes. The code was based on the frequency of use. Letters that were used quite frequently like “E” received a simple code, while others that were used infrequently such as “Q” received a more in depth code. The Morse code in the beginning was marks on a piece of paper that a telegraph operator would translate. The paper was quickly replaced by a receiver that allowed the operators to hear and interpret the code by simply listening to it. In 1843, Samuel Morse and his colleague Alfred Vail received funding from the U.S. Congress to set up and test their telegraph system between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. “On May 24, 1844, the first historic message was sent. Samuel Morse sent Alfred Vail the message of “What hath God wrought! (History.com,

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