American Morse Code

Who knew? Not me, clearly, when I wrote about early telegraphic [=far writing] codes comparing Cooke and Wheatstone's first attempt with International Morse Code in 2019. Samuel Morse was not the onlie begetter of I.M.C. His first attempt at a single wire code which depended on the lengths of beeeeps and unbeeps for signal is shown below [source]:

The Morse code allows for combos of long beep = dash /dah , short beep = dot / ditand no beep = space. The original "American" or "railway" Code allowed for spaces within letters! I've flagged the cases of C O R n Z on the picture; HawkeYe You will soon ferret out at least one other example. It also used a long dash for L and a longer dash for 0=zero. 

Friedrich Clemens Gerke [who he? never 'eard of him?? - me neither], employed by der Electro–Magnetischen Telegraphen–Compagnie in Hamburg, gave Morse's code a significant make-over, changing about half the letters and allowing a) no intra-letter spaces b) only dits and dahs [which were 3x dits] and spaces. Gerke's code was accepted / mandated by the Deutsch-Oesterreichischer Telegraphenverein in 1851 and by the new International Telecommunication Union in 1865 as Continental or International Morse Code, which we know today. In the USA, it proved surprisingly hard for International Morse to get traction. This was partly from inertia and vested interest, esp with Western Union and the Railways, but also because with more dits and fewer dahs, transmission rates were faster for American Morse. See also inches and pounds, Stateside.

Nobody knows - I can't easily discover - why Morse came up with that particular arbitrary encoding. Like you can see the ghost of the traditional alphabet on the middle line ASDFGHJKL of a qwerty keyboard, there is some logic / inherent efficiency in that common letters ETAOIN tend to have shorter encodings: E • T - A •- O --- I •• N -• - although O is the exception to this rule. John Cooke has done an actual analysis of this to find that International Morse is about 93.5% efficient based on a large corpus of English words. Cranks who want to change Morse code for efficiency thus have their work cut out.

Dylan Beattie started me off down this rabbit'ole. With an update of his NDC talk about Plain Text, whc prev.