Morse Code, either of two systems for representing letters of the alphabet, numerals, and punctuation marks by an arrangement of dots, dashes, and spaces. The codes are transmitted as electrical pulses of varied lengths or analogous mechanical or visual signals, such as flashing lights. One of the systems was invented in the United States by American artist and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse during the 1830s for electrical telegraphy. This version was further improved by American scientist and businessman Alfred Lewis Vail, Morse’s assistant and partner. Soon after its introduction in Europe, it became apparent that the original Morse Code was inadequate for the transmission of much non-English text, since it lacked codes for letters with diacritic marks. To remedy this deficiency, a variant called the International Morse Code was devised by a conference of European nations in 1851. This newer code is also called Continental Morse Code.
The two systems are similar, but the International Morse Code is simpler and more precise. For example, the original Morse Code used patterns of dots and spaces to represent a few of the letters, whereas the International Morse uses combinations of dots and short dashes for all letters. In addition, the International Morse Code uses dashes of constant length rather than the variable lengths used in the original Morse Code.
The International Morse Code has, except for some minor changes in 1938, remained the same since its inception. (The American telegraph industry never abandoned the original Morse Code, and so its use continued until the spread of teleprinters in the 1920s and ’30s.) International Morse Code was used in World War II and in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was used heavily by the shipping industry and for the safety of the seas up until the early 1990s. Although amateur radio made up only a small part of Morse Code usage, it did prepare many hundreds of operators for military duty in communications. In the early 2000s most countries had dropped the ability to decipher Morse Code from the requirements for obtaining an amateur radio license.
Samuel F.B. Morse (born April 27, 1791, Charlestown, Massachusetts, U.S.—died April 2, 1872, New York, New York) was an American painter and inventor who developed an electric telegraph (1832–35). In 1838 he and his friend Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code.
He was the son of the distinguished geographer and Congregational clergyman Jedidiah Morse. From Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he had been an unsteady and eccentric student, his parents sent him to Yale College (now Yale University) in New Haven, Connecticut. Although he was an indifferent scholar, his interest was aroused by lectures on the then little-understood subject of electricity. To the distress of his austere parents, he also enjoyed painting miniature portraits.
After graduating from Yale in 1810, Morse became a clerk for a Boston book publisher. But painting continued to be his main interest, and in 1811 his parents helped him go to England in order to study that art with American painter Washington Allston. During the War of 1812, between Great Britain and the United States, Morse reacted to the English contempt for Americans by becoming passionately pro-American. Like the majority of Americans of his time, however, he accepted English artistic standards, including the “historical” style of painting—the Romantic portrayal of legends and historical events with personalities gracing the foreground in grand poses and brilliant colours.
When, on his return home in 1815,
Morse found that Americans did not appreciate his historical canvases, he reluctantly took up portraiture again to earn a living. He began as an itinerant painter in New England, New York, and South Carolina. After 1825, on settling in New York City, he painted some of the finest portraits ever done by an American artist. He combined technical competence and a bold rendering of his subjects’ character with a touch of the Romanticism he had imbibed in England.
Although often poor during those early years, Morse was sociable and at home with intellectuals, the wealthy, the religiously orthodox, and the politically conservative. In addition, he possessed the gift of friendship. Among his friends in his middle years were a French hero of the American Revolution, the marquis de Lafayette, whose attempts to promote liberal reform in Europe Morse ardently endorsed, and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Morse and Cooper shared several traits: both were ardent U.S. republicans, though both had aristocratic social tastes, and both suffered from the American preference for European art.
Morse also had the gift of leadership. As part of a campaign against the licentiousness of the theatre, he helped launch, in 1827, the New York Journal of Commerce, which refused theatre advertisements. He also was a founder of the National Academy of Design, organized to increase U.S. respect for painters, and was its first president from 1826 to 1845.
In 1832, while returning by ship from studying art in Europe, Morse conceived the idea of an electric telegraph as the result of hearing a conversation about the newly discovered electromagnet. Although the idea of an electric telegraph had been put forward in 1753 and electric telegraphs had been used to send messages over short distances as early as 1774, Morse believed that his was the first such proposal. He probably made his first working model by 1835.
Meanwhile, Morse was still devoting most of his time to painting, teaching art at the University of the City of New York (later New York University), and to politics (he ran on anti-immigrant and anti-Roman Catholic tickets for mayor of New York in 1836 and 1841). But by 1837 he had turned his full attention to the new invention. A colleague at the university, chemist Leonard Gale, introduced Morse to Joseph Henry’s work on electromagnetism. The powerful electromagnets that Henry had devised allowed Morse to send messages over 16 km (10 miles) of wire, a much longer distance than the 12 metres (40 feet) over which his first model could transmit. A friend, Alfred Vail, offered to provide materials and labour to build models in his family’s ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey. Gale and Vail became partners in Morse’s telegraph rights. By 1838 he and Vail had developed the system of dots and dashes that became known throughout the world as the Morse Code. In 1838, while unsuccessfully attempting to interest Congress in building a telegraph line, he acquired Maine Congressman F.O.J. Smith as an additional partner. After failing to organize the construction of a Morse line in Europe, Morse alone among his partners persevered in promoting the telegraph, and in 1843 he was finally able to obtain financial support from Congress for the first telegraph line in the United States, from Baltimore to Washington. In 1844 the line was completed, and on May 24 he sent the first message, “What hath God wrought.”
Morse was immediately involved in legal claims by his partners and by rival inventors. A natural controversialist like his father, he fought vigorously in this and other controversies, such as those in art with painter John Trumbull, in religion with Unitarians and Roman Catholics, in politics with the Irish and abolitionists, and in daguerreotypy—of which he was one of the first practitioners in America—with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s pupil, François Gouraud. The legal battles over the telegraph culminated in an 1854 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established his patent rights. As telegraph lines lengthened on both sides of the Atlantic, his wealth and fame increased. By 1847 Morse had bought Locust Grove, an estate overlooking the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, New York, where, early in the 1850s, he built an Italian villa-style mansion. He spent his summers there with his large family of children and grandchildren, returning each winter season to his brownstone home in New York City.
In his old age, Morse, a patriarch with a flowing beard, became a philanthropist. He gave generously to Vassar College, of which he was a founder and trustee; to his alma mater, Yale College; and to churches, theological seminaries, Bible societies, mission societies, and temperance societies, as well as to poor artists.
Even during Morse’s own lifetime, the world was much changed by the telegraph. In the decades after his death in 1872, his fame as an inventor was obscured by the invention of the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, while his reputation as an artist has grown. At one time he did not wish to be remembered as a portrait painter, but his powerful and sensitive portraits, among them those of Lafayette, the American writer William Cullen Bryant, and other prominent men, have been exhibited throughout the United States. The number of Morse telegraphic operators has decreased sharply, but his memory is perpetuated by the Morse Telegraph Club (1942), an association dedicated to the history of telegraphy. His 1837 telegraph instrument is preserved by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., while his estate, Locust Grove, is now designated a national historic landmark.
telegraph, any device or system that allows the transmission of information by coded signal over distance. Many telegraphic systems have been used over the centuries, but the term is most often understood to refer to the electric telegraph, which was developed in the mid-19th century and for more than 100 years was the principal means of transmitting printed information by wire or radio wave.
Preelectric telegraph systems
The word telegraph is derived from the Greek words tele, meaning “distant,” and graphein, meaning “to write.” It came into use toward the end of the 18th century to describe an optical semaphore system developed in France. However, many types of telegraphic communication have been employed since before recorded history. The earliest methods of communication at a distance made use of such media as smoke, fire, drums, and reflected rays of the Sun. Visual signals given by flags and torches were used for short-range communication and continued to be utilized well into the 20th century, when the two-flag semaphore system was widely used, particularly by the world’s navies.
Before the development of the electric telegraph, visual systems were used to convey messages over distances by means of variable displays. One of the most successful of the visual telegraphs was the semaphore developed in France by the Chappe brothers, Claude and Ignace, in 1791. This system consisted of pairs of movable arms mounted at the ends of a crossbeam on hilltop towers. Each arm of the semaphore could assume seven angular positions 45° apart, and the horizontal beam could tilt 45° clockwise or counterclockwise. In this manner it was possible to represent numbers and the letters of the alphabet. Chains of these towers were built to permit transmission over long distances. The towers were spaced at intervals of 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles), and a signaling rate of three symbols per minute could be achieved.
Another widely used visual telegraph was developed in 1795 by George Murray in England. In Murray’s device, characters were sent by opening and closing various combinations of six shutters. This system rapidly caught on in England and in the United States, where a number of sites bearing the name Telegraph Hill or Signal Hill can still be found, particularly in coastal regions. Visual telegraphs were completely replaced by the electric telegraph by the middle of the 19th century.
The beginning of electric telegraphy
The first transmitters and receivers
The electric telegraph did not burst suddenly upon the scene but rather resulted from a scientific evolution that had been taking place since the 18th century in the field of electricity. One of the key developments was the invention of the voltaic cell in 1800 by Alessandro Volta of Italy. This made it possible to power electric devices in a more effective manner using relatively low voltages and high currents. Previous methods of producing electricity employed frictional generation of static electricity, which led to high voltages and low currents. Many devices incorporating high-voltage static electricity and various detectors such as pith balls and sparks were proposed for use in telegraphic systems. All were unsuccessful, however, because the severe losses in the transmission wires, particularly in bad weather, limited reliable operation to relatively short distances. Application of the battery to telegraphy was made possible by several further developments in the new science of electromagnetism. In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted of Denmark discovered that a magnetic needle could be deflected by a wire carrying an electric current. In 1825 in Britain William Sturgeon discovered the multiturn electromagnet, and in 1831 Michael Faraday of Britain and Joseph Henry of the United States refined the science of electromagnetism sufficiently to make it possible to design practical electromagnetic devices.
The first two practical electric telegraphs appeared at almost the same time. In 1837 the British inventors Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone obtained a patent on a telegraph system that employed six wires and actuated five needle pointers attached to five galvanoscopes at the receiver. If currents were sent through the proper wires, the needles could be made to point to specific letters and numbers on their mounting plate.
In 1832 Samuel F.B. Morse, a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York (later New York University), became interested in the possibility of electric telegraphy and made sketches of ideas for such a system. In 1835 he devised a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. In 1837 he was granted a patent on an electromagnetic telegraph. Morse’s original transmitter incorporated a device called a portarule, which employed molded type with built-in dots and dashes. The type could be moved through a mechanism in such a manner that the dots and dashes would make and break the contact between the battery and the wire to the receiver. The receiver, or register, embossed the dots and dashes on an unwinding strip of paper that passed under a stylus. The stylus was actuated by an electromagnet turned on and off by the signals from the transmitter.
Morse had formed a partnership with Alfred Vail, who was a clever mechanic and is credited with many contributions to the Morse system. Among them are the replacement of the portarule transmitter by a simple make-and-break key, the refinement of the Morse Code so that the shortest code sequences were assigned to the most frequently occurring letters, and the improvement of the mechanical design of all the system components. The first demonstration of the system by Morse was conducted for his friends at his workplace in 1837. In 1843 Morse obtained financial support from the U.S. government to build a demonstration telegraph system 60 km (35 miles) long between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Md. Wires were attached by glass insulators to poles alongside a railroad. The system was completed and public use initiated on May 24, 1844, with transmission of the message, “What hath God wrought!” This inaugurated the telegraph era in the United States, which was to last more than 100 years.
Development of the telegraph industry
Although railroad traffic control was one of the earliest applications of the telegraph, it immediately became a vital tool for the transmission of news around the country. In 1848 the Associated Press was formed in the United States to pool telegraph expenses, and in 1849 Paul Julius Reuters in Paris initiated telegraphic press service (using pigeons to cover sections where lines were incomplete). By 1851 more than 50 telegraph companies were in operation in the United States. One of the most significant was the New York and Mississippi Printing Telegraph Company formed by Hiram Sibley, which was soon consolidated with a number of other start-up telegraph companies into the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856. Western Union became the dominant telegraph company in the United States. In 1861 it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line, connecting San Francisco to the Midwest and then on to the East Coast. After the Union Pacific Railroad was finished in 1869, much of the line was relocated to run along the railroad right-of-way to facilitate maintenance.
In Britain the Electric Telegraph Company was formed in 1845 to promote development of the needle telegraph system. As in the United States, development of the telegraph was carried out by highly competitive private companies, but a movement toward monopoly was strong. In 1870 the telegraph industry was nationalized and became part of the British Post Office.
Because of worldwide interest in applications of the telegraph, the International Telegraph Union was formed in 1865 to establish standards for use in international communication. In the following year the first successful transatlantic cables were completed.
Advances in telegraph technology
Signal processing and transmission
Soon after its introduction in Europe it became apparent that the American Morse Code was inadequate for the transmission of much non-English text because it lacked letters with diacritical marks. A variant that ultimately became known as the International Morse Code was adopted in 1851 for use on cables, for land telegraph lines except in North America, and later for wireless telegraphy. Except for some minor improvements in 1938, the International Morse Code has remained unchanged. It is no longer a major means of commercial or maritime communications, but it is still used by amateur radio operators.
New technology and devices kept appearing and led to a continual evolution of the telegraph industry during the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. By 1856 the register in the Morse system was replaced by a sounder, and the code was transcribed directly from the sounds by the operator. In 1871 J.B. Stearns of the United States completed refinement of the duplex transmission system originated in Germany by Wilhelm Gintl, which allowed the same line to be used simultaneously for sending and receiving, thus doubling its capacity. This system was further improved by the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who patented a quadraplex telegraph system in 1874 that permitted the simultaneous transmission of two signals in each direction on a single line. A major new concept was introduced in 1871 by Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot in France. Baudot devised a system for multiplexing (switching) a single line among a number of simultaneous users. The heart of the system was a distributor consisting of a stationary face plate containing concentric circular copper rings that were swept by brushes mounted on a rotating assembly. The face plate was divided into sectors depending on the number of users. Each sector could produce a sequence of five on or off connections that represented a transmitted letter or symbol. The on/off connections were referred to as marks or spaces—in modern terminology, binary digits, or bits, consisting of ones or zeros—and the 32 possible symbols that they encoded came to be known as the Baudot Code. In the Baudot system, the transmitter and receiver had to be operated in synchrony so that the correct transmitter and receiver were connected at the same time. The first systems used manual transmission, but this was soon replaced with perforated tape. Variations of this system were used well into the 20th century; and it was the forerunner of what is now known as time-division multiplexing.
During this time of rapid change in the telegraph industry a new device, the telephone, was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Although the telephone was originally expected to replace the telegraph completely, this turned out not to be the case: both industries thrived side by side for many decades. Much of the technology developed for telephony had parallel applications in telegraphy. A number of systems were developed that allowed simultaneous transmission of telegraph and telephone signals on the same lines. In 1882 the Western Electric Company was acquired from Western Union by the American Bell Telephone Company. Western Electric had started as a telegraph manufacturing company but later became a major contributor to both the telephone and telegraph industries.
The vacuum tube, patented by Lee De Forest in the United States in 1907, led to several improvements in telegraph performance and greatly intensified research efforts in telegraphy, telephony, and the emerging field of wireless communication. In 1918 modulated carriers with frequency-division multiplexing, in which several different frequencies are transmitted simultaneously over the same line, were introduced. At the receiving end the different signals were separated from one another by frequency-selective filters and sent to separate decoding units, thus allowing as many as 24 telegraph signals to be transmitted over a single telephone channel. Vacuum tube circuits were used to amplify and regenerate weak signals in a manner not previously possible. The development of new magnetic materials enabled more effective loading of transmission lines, thereby improving transmission speeds. In 1928 loading was first successfully applied to submarine cables to allow duplex operation, but it was not until 1950 that Western Union installed the first successful underwater vacuum tube repeater.
Printing telegraphs
In 1903 the British inventor Donald Murray, following the ideas of Baudot, devised a time-division multiplex system for the British Post Office. The transmitter used a typewriter keyboard that punched tape, and the receiver printed text. He modified the Baudot Code by assigning code combinations with the fewest punched holes to the most frequently encountered letters and symbols. Murray sold the patent rights to Western Union and Western Electric in 1912, and this formed the basis of the printing telegraph systems that came into use in the 1920s.
In 1924 the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) introduced a printing telegraph system called the Teletype, which became widely used for business communication. The unit consisted of a typewriter keyboard and a simplex printer. Each keystroke generated a series of coded electric impulses that were then sent over the transmission line to the receiving system. There the receiver decoded the pulses and printed the message on a paper tape or other medium.
For many years teleprinters used the five-bit Baudot Code and, in some cases, other specialized codes. With the advent of computers, however, it became apparent that the Baudot Code was no longer adequate, and in 1966 the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was established. ASCII consisted of seven bits, compared with five bits for the Baudot Code; these allowed 128 different coded letters or symbols, as compared with 32 for the Baudot Code. Code speeds of 150 words per minute were possible with teleprinter systems using the ASCII code, as compared with 75 words per minute for those using the Baudot Code.
In 1932 AT&T inaugurated the Teletypewriter Exchange Service (TWX), a switched teleprinter network. Switching was accomplished manually until it was automated after World War II. In Europe a similar service called Telex was inaugurated in the early 1930s and was partially automated in Germany before World War II. In 1962 Western Union introduced Telex in the United States as an international teleprinter service, and in 1970 it acquired TWX from AT&T. It was not possible for the Telex and TWX instruments to communicate directly with one another because of differences in transmission codes and transmission speeds. Western Union linked the two services through a network of processing centres that made the necessary conversions between the two systems.
The end of the telegraph era
After World War II much new technology became available that radically changed the telegraph industry. Old wire lines were too expensive to maintain and were replaced by coaxial cable and microwave links. Very wide-bandwidth channels became available, allowing transmission speeds limited only by the capabilities of the terminal equipment. These new transmission media were later augmented by satellite links and fibre optic transmission lines. In 1974 the Westar satellite, providing enormous capacity for all types of telecommunication, was placed in operation by Western Union. These new transmission channels were complemented by new electronic technology including transistors, integrated circuits, and various microelectronics devices that reduced costs and improved performance. With the advent of the digital computer in the 1960s, the trend toward entirely digital communication began.
The facsimile telegraph was perfected in the 1930s and was widely used for sending photographs and other graphic information over telephone and telegraph lines in an analog transmission system. By the 1980s, however, analog facsimile was virtually replaced by the digital fax machine. In many offices, fax machines and e-mail began to replace other types of communication, including telegrams, TWX, Telex, and, in many cases, the postal service. In the face of changing technology, the Western Union Telegraph Company was reorganized as the Western Union Corporation in 1988 to handle money transfers and related services. It sold its international private line service to Tele-Columbus AG of Switzerland, the Westar satellite system was sold to GM Hughes Electronics Corporation of the United States, and AT&T acquired Western Union’s business services group. The telegraph, which had started in 1837, was replaced in most applications in developed countries by digital data-transmission systems based on computer technology.
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