Morse Code
Morse Code was invented as a means of communicating over long distance telegraph wires, prior to the invention of the telephone.
Its inventor, bizarrely enough, was Samuel Morse.
Samuel Morse came up with the concept of transmitting short and long sound pulses which, when converted to electricity, would pass along telegraph wires and be converted back to sound at the distant end.
Each character in the alphabet, along with the numbers 0 through 9, was allocated a different sequence of short and long pulses, known as Dots and Dashes (or, to an RTG, dits and dahs).
Some of the more common puncuation was encoded using conjuntions of 2 or 3 letters "run together" i.e. without the normal spacing.
The letters, and corresponding code, are showing in the table below:
United Kingdom
| A .- | B _... | C -.-. | D _.. | E . |
| F .._. | G --. | H .... | I .. | J .--- |
| K -.- | L .-.. | M -- | N -. | O --- |
| P .--. | Q --.- | R .-. | S ... | T - |
| U ..- | V ...- | W ..- | X -..- | Y -.-- |
| Z --.. | ||||
| 1 .---- | 2 ..--- | 3 ...-- | 4 ....- | 5 ..... |
| 6 -.... | 7 --... | 8 ---.. | 9 ----. | 0 ----- |
| Full Stop (AAA) .-.-.- | Comma (MIM) --..-- | ( (KN) -.--. | ) (KK) -.--.- | ? (INT) ..-.- |
| Short Break (II) .. .. | Long Break (BT) -...- | - (Hyphen) (DU) -....- | / (Slant) (XE) -..-. | : Colon (OS) ---... |
The only character to have been added to the International Morse Alphabet since 1918 is the commercial at (@) symbol, represented by the conjunction "AC", therefore sounding .--.-.
