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Telegraph and Morse Code Source Note

Title: @editorsMorseCodeTelegraph2022 date: 2023-03-07 type: reference

tags:: #Telegraph #MorseCode #Memex2

Reference

Editors, H com. 2022. Morse Code & the Telegraph. HISTORY, 12 August 2022. Available at https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph [Last accessed 8 February 2023].

Annotations:

Summary & Key Takeaways

  • The article describes the telegraph in great deal and the language used, known as Morse code. The telegraph, invented by, Samuel Morse, worked by sending electrical signals through wires. It was revolutionary as it was an extremely quick way to communicate with another person on the other end of the wire. It was used at railways to conduct traffic, and it allowed for travel time to be reduced significantly. Civilizations in ancient times had other methods of communicating over long distances, such as smoke or large structure, but they were affected by weather. The telegraph needed a language to be used to communicate, as the receiving side had no physical way of hearing the English words the other person was saying. Morse came up with what he called Morse code. It used a series of dots and dashes mapped to each of the letters of the alphabet based off-frequency. It was similar to ciphers, as the receiver had to convert the dashes to English. The telegraph was a revolution for its time.