Morse Code

About the history of the creation of Morse code

Morse code was invented along with telegraph machines in 1838. They were invented and implemented by the American Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, but the original idea of creating a way to quickly transmit messages originated with him 13 years before.

Samuel Finley Breeze Morse (1791 - 1872)

Earlier, Samuel Morse was actively engaged in painting, having created many famous paintings during his career (for example, a portrait of President Munro), he was even awarded a gold medal for an exhibition of his works, and also in 1826 he founded the Society of Painters in New York and became its first president, in 1829 this association was renamed the National Academy of Design.

Perhaps Morse would not have become the creator of the telegraph, but in 1825 his wife became seriously ill. Having received the news about this with a delay, the artist hurriedly went home, but by the time she arrived, she had already died. The messages reached the recipients for too long, because Samuel, who personally experienced a sad experience, caught fire with the idea of creating a device that would allow faster messaging over a long distance. In the same year, the English engineer William Steger manufactured the first electromagnet in the form of an iron rod with a copper wire winding.

Attempts to transmit messages over short distances have been made since 1774, but there have been no great successes, so Morse can be considered a pioneer in this field. Inspired by the idea of a newly created electromagnet, he came up with the idea of a prototype telegraph: it was a device consisting of a lever on a spring with a pencil at one end. When the current was applied, the side with the pencil was lowered, the lead left a line on the paper. Morse himself had no technical education, so the work was slow. Other significant figures in this story were Alfred Vail, a friend of Samuel Morse, with whom they began to develop a special encoding, and Alfred's father Stephen Vail, an entrepreneur and industrialist who saw commercial potential in Morse's ideas, and therefore invested in them financially.

The first assembled device transmitted a maximum of 12 meters, but in 1837, thanks to new electromagnets developed by the brilliant physicist Joseph Henry, it was possible to transmit a signal over a distance of more than 16 kilometers. And so on February 8, 1838, at the Franklin Institute, Samuel Morse presented to the public an electromagnetic telegraph that transmitted messages encoded from long and short combinations of dots and dashes. This code initially took into account the most commonly used letters in the English language. The more often a letter is used, the shorter it is, and its structure is simpler.

Alfred Lewis Vale (1807-1859)

Joseph Henry (1797-1878)

On May 24, 1844, the first official message was successfully transmitted from Washington to Baltimore using telegraph and Morse code: "What hath God done!", an excerpt of a biblical verse, it is usually translated into Russian roughly as "This is what God does!" or "Wonderful are your works, Lord!"

Although some sources say that as early as January 6, 1838, a message was successfully transmitted over the wires of the Speedwell steel mill (near Morristown, New Jersey) at a distance of 2 miles: "A patient waiter is no loser" (can be translated as "Patiently waiting is not a loser").

The first version of the code was different from the modern one: in addition to the "dot" and "dash", it contained pauses of different lengths inside the characters, "long dashes" (4 times longer than the dot), the digit "0" was one giant dash (10 times longer than the dot), and was not originally provided for transfer of letters missing in the English alphabet.

In 1848, the encoding was improved by the German Friedrich Gerke. It is this version of the code that will be adopted by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) in the future like the International Morse Code, which is used to this day. The original Morse code began to be called American.

Friedrich Clemens Goerke (1801-1888)

In modern international Morse code, the duration of a dot (the shortest signal) is taken as a unit of time, the duration of a dash is 3 dots, the pause between elements of one character is 1 dot, between characters in a word - 3 dots, between words - 7 dots.

For a long time, other versions of the code existed in parallel with each other, which were used by other countries, since telegraph lines were wired at that time and this did not cause any particular inconvenience. Russian Russian version was adopted in 1856: similar Latin codes were used for Russian letters, for example O(---) and O(---) or L(.-..) and L(.-..). In the 1930s, due to the rapid development of wireless radio, the international code Morse displaced the others.

In 2004, the International Telecommunication Union introduced the Morse code for the symbol "commercial et" (or in the vernacular "dog") @(.--.-.), to facilitate the transfer of email addresses.

Advantages and disadvantages

The main disadvantages of "morse code" are uneconomical time and low speed of telegraphy: it takes time to transmit one sign, and there are pauses between the signs in the word and the words directly proportional to the length of the dashes and dots. It is also inconvenient because different characters have different lengths, that is, the same number of different letters will be transmitted at different speeds, which is why the number of words per minute becomes an approximate concept. Even before the auditory reception became the main one for telegraph devices, other encryption methods were invented, which were more complicated, but were transmitted much faster.

In turn, the main advantages of Morse code are its reliability and simplicity, thanks to which a person can independently encode and decode without using terminal devices and receive a signal using the simplest devices, as well as extremely high stability, which allows communication even in conditions of fairly strong radio interference.

Auditory reception

With the progress in the field of radio communication, Morse code almost immediately began to be tried as a signal that can be received with the help of the operator's auditory abilities. Initially, the first receiving devices were tried to be made on the basis of an electromagnetic relay and a call like wired telegraph devices, but the threshold for triggering any relays was too high to register very weak signals coming from the antenna. In 1899, at Fort Milyutin, during the adjustment of radio communications, P. N. Rybkin, assistant A. S. Popov, accidentally discovered the possibility of receiving a telegraph signal by ear using conventional stereo headphones. It turned out that this is possible due to the previously unknown properties of the electromagnetic oscillation detector - the coherer. Soon a new telephone receiver based on Rybkin's discovery was patented by Popov, and a little later the auditory reception of Morse code became the main one.

A. S. Popov (1859-1905)

P. N. Rybkin (1865 - 1948)

To facilitate the training and work of the radio operators of the "morse code", various techniques were invented: the most common can be called tunes invented during the Second World War. You can remember the encoding visually, that is, "as it is written", but when receiving by ear, the operator simply does not have time to count the number of dots-dashes and translate them. Chants are a special mnemonic technique that allows you to memorize not sequences of dots and dashes, but their sound. For example, the letter "L" (.-..) "lu-naa-ti-ki" is sung. In fact, they do not have a standard and may differ from person to person and from case to case the same symbol "@"(.--.-.) it has 2 common tunes: "so-baa-kaa-re-shaa-et" and "so-baa-kaa-ku-saa-et".

An alternative to chants is the method of memorizing the "melody" of the symbol: some sources state that it allows you to accept it with greater speed, since with chants the brain has to do double work: put a chant in accordance with the signal, and then translate it into the appropriate sign. Whether this is true or false is unknown, but it is worth emphasizing that both approaches take place.

You can transmit and receive Morse code at different speeds, it depends on the level of skills and capabilities of the radio operator. As you learn, an associative connection of the sound with the sign to which it belongs appears; thanks to this, it is relatively easy to learn how to send and receive messages at a rate of 50-100 characters per minute.

Usually the received signal is recorded; you can try it by ear, but it is much more complicated and requires a lot of experience, and when receiving very long messages it becomes impossible in principle. At high speeds, a person simply does not have time to write in the usual way, because shorthand methods are used, shorthand or, if you do not have the skill of high-speed writing, typing using the keyboard. Experienced radio operators use a method of recording with a lag of several characters, which makes receiving a radiogram somewhat calmer and more reliable, but it requires a very high level of skills.

How long does it take to learn Morse code? On average, if you practice 3-4 times a week for 1.5 - 2 hours a day with breaks every 30 minutes, you can safely learn to work at a speed of 40 - 60 characters per minute; depending on the person, it will take from 2 to 6 months. First, it is better to learn the characters (first letters, then numbers), then learn how to receive and finally transfer using a key.

Transfer and keys

The Morse code is transmitted using telegraph keys of one design or another, they can be divided into vertical and electronic.

The vertical key is a classic Morse telegraph key, invented together with the telegraph. This is a simple design consisting of a platform, a contact and a rocker arm swinging on a spring in a vertical plane, which closes the contact when pressed.

Usually the transfer rate with such keys does not exceed 100 - 120 characters per minute.