Remembering The Historic Morse Code

Hello all, I wanna tell you about something which seems interesting and something impacted the world history in a great extent. It's last month, I was watching a movie "Vivekam" and you could ask me :

• What's in it, dude ?.

Ok, cool dude ! In that Hero and Heroine were talking to each other in a way that others couldn't understand. And that Secret code is our article's title : "Morse Code".

As I'm very passionate to learn about new things, I went through wikipedia about Morse code and found very interesting facts. Let me share few of those with you :)

• Okay Dude tell me first, what's the Morse Code ?

Remember Binary numbers ? Every number can be represented in 0's and 1's. And using these binary numbers only, our computers work. Like that Morse code is a method of representing each alphabet in simple dots(.) and dashes(_). Not only dots & dashes, it can be Flash-light, Beep tones, Winking and Touching, the last three methods are used by hero and heroine to communicate, in the movie that I mentioned above (long-time:dash, short-time:dot).

Yes, you can chat with your girlfriend without fear of your third party friend who annoys you by reading your messages, LOL :)

Actually, in old days, People had used telegraphs to communicate until late 90's. Beginning in 1836, the American artist Samuel F. B. Morse, the American physicist Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system.

It seemed very hard for them to transmit Alpha-numeric characters through communication channels. Then, Samuel Morse had invented a code which was very convenient and efficient for communications with his telegraph system. He used simple Huffman coding to do this, which is very popular in Information theory.

And here it is what he did :

And this morse code went through many major changes. Finally ITU (International Telecommunication Union) standardized the International Morse code.

• Ho Ho Ho ! Did you just write your name in Morse code ?

My name will be look like : .- -. .. .-..

Okay how would you read that code ? dot-dash-dot...., Actually It's spoken as : dit(.) dah(-). My name will be spoken like : di-dah dah-dit di-dit di-dah-di-dit

Cool ! We've nailed it !

• Aah - Stop ! What's in it on learning this code ?

Now-a-days Morse code lost it's grace and importance. But in the time of world war-I, It became most famous. Both civilian and military pilots were required to be able to use Morse code, both for use with early communications systems and for identification of some places which transmitted continuous two- or three-letter identifiers in Morse code.

In Navy, this Morse code is widely used and still US Navy is recruiting the Morse code operators. We often get to see the famous Emergency signal i.e., SOS ( ... --- ...) which is sent using Morse code.

• Dude ! It's interesting and I wanna learn, Is there any easy way to learn ?

Yes, People learn Morse code mostly using the Farnsworth method. And another popular teaching method is the Koch method. See this picture :

I found this picture very useful and I learned using this.

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Hope you get some useful information from this article. Thank you for reading :)

Please feel free to give me a feedback and let me correct some mistakes I did, which you noticed in this article.

Source & Pic Credits : Wikipedia