By Staff Writer Jerri Clewis
These days messages can be sent instantaneously between people thousands of miles apart, but it wasn’t always that way. Before the 1800s, messages had to be carried by messengers, usually by horse, over long distances to reach their intended destinations.
Things changed for long-distance communication in 1837 with the rise of the commercial telegraph, developed by William Forthergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, but the system wasn’t perfect yet. A year later, Samuel Finley Breese Morse and his assistant, Alfred Vail, created a successful telegraph device that could use a special code of their making—Morse code.
Morse later demonstrated his telegraph and code to the United States Congress in 1844 through the few short words of “What hath God wrought.” After the demonstration, the code quickly gained popularity and even received an international version during a conference in Berlin in 1851.
Morse and Vail’s telegraph required tapping out Morse code for each letter through short and long signals called dits (represented by dots) and dahs (represented by dashes), respectively. Part of the code’s development meant keeping it as short as possible, and Morse found a unique way of tackling that problem.
The inventor visited a local newspaper company because, at the time, newspapers were using wooden letter blocks to print, which meant there would be more blocks for frequently used letters. During that visit, Morse discovered the company had more wooden blocks for the letter ‘E’ than any other letter, according to the Millennium Mathematics Project. That’s why ‘e’ has the shortest code, a single dit.
Morse code also requires time between the dits and dahs and between the words. A dit takes one unit of time, a dah takes three, and the pause between them takes one. The pause between letters is three units of time, and between words is seven. The word “Paris” is used as the length of a standard word at 50 units of time—43 for the letters and seven for the space after the word.