History of Morse Alphabet

The Morse Alphabet was created in 1835 by Samuel Morse, who became interested in telegraphy in 1832, and began to be used in 1837. Samuel Morse was not only an inventor but also a painter. Before the invention of the telegraph, most messages that had to be sent over long distances were carried by messengers who memorized or carried them in writing. These messages could not be delivered any faster than the fastest horse. Using flags and then mechanical systems called semaphore telegraphs, messages could also be sent visually, but these systems required the recipient to be close enough to see the sender and not be available at night.

THE FIRST COMMERCIAL TELEGRAPH WAS DEVELOPED IN 1837

The telegraph allowed messages to be sent very fast over long distances using electricity. The first commercial telegraph was developed in 1837 by William Forthergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. They developed a device that could send messages using electrical signals to line up compass pins in a grid containing the letters of the alphabet. Then, in 1838, Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail introduced a more successful telegraph device that sent messages using a special code - Morse code. Telegram messages were sent by selecting a code for each letter in the form of short and long signals. Short signals are represented by dots, and long signals by dashes. Thus, the code was converted into electrical pulses and sent over telegraph wires. The telegram receiver on the other end of the cable decoded the message by converting the alerts back into points and lines. Morse code is quite simple, letters from A to Z and 0 through 9 each have their own unique dot-dash code. While Morse sequences of characters in the alphabet seem rather random and do not seem to follow any logical order, it turns out that most messages will be shorter using shorter sequences in more frequently used letters.