WAVES recruting poster
Even though they had been known already for one hundred years telegraph and morse code were, in conjunction with radio, the most common methods of comunication during war time...In some cases there were entire units dedicated to the listening and the receiving of messages like for the GCHQ and the SIGINT in the UK,the FRA in Sweden, the NSA in the USA or the AT in Netherlands.
To be more precise the telegraph is way older than the morse code, there were in fact already multiple examples of this device:
- 4th century. BC, greek hydarulic telegraph descibed by Aeneas Tacticus, and in the 3rd century by the hystorian Polybious
- In the1792 the optical telegraph made its entrance in the world technological scene thanks to the french Claude Chappe and it was a precursor of its electrical version.
- It is 1832 is the when the electrical telegraph makes its first steps into history, with the prototype presented by Schilling von Canstatt. From that moments a lot of different evolutions of the Electrical telegraph were presented, like the Gauss-Weber (1933) or the Cooke & Weatstone (1837)
- But a the gratest step was made by Samuel Morse, with the development of the electro-magnetic telegraph, whose patent was registered by Morse itself on June, 20th 1940 and improved in the following years, because he didn't create just the machine, but he also introduced a specifically designed comunication method: The Morse Code. It consisted in the rappresentation of letters and numbers with a series of dots and lines properly alternated as presented in the photo below, and in the one under it (in a more grafical way which makes it easier to learn). The disposition of the characters differs in base of the language considered, but few rules stay the same, like the relative time that passes between the different letters (3 time units) or between the words (7 time units), where the time unit is defined by the gap between the different elements of the same letter.
The Morse Code Alphabet
The Morse Code in Graphical Version
The Morse Code in Graphical Version
Art by Ward Cunningham
"Shots from uphill—then, maybe from Närrisch in reply, a burst of automatic fire. Otto
is holding his Hilde close. "Anybody read Morse Code?" the girl next to Slothrop wants to
know, "because there's been a light going over there, see, at the tip of that little island? for
a few minutes now." It's three dots, dot, dot, three more dots. Over and over.
"Hmm, SEES," ponders Felix.
"Maybe they're not dots," sez the tenor-sax player, "maybe they're dashes.""
[Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon]
"In Napoléon’s time nothing could move faster than a horse,’ said Erik. ‘Today we have motor
vehicles and wireless telegraphy. Modern communications have enabled us to succeed where
Napoléon failed."
"The signals were in Morse Code, but the dots and dashes of naval signals translated into five-digit
number groups, each representing a letter, word or phrase in a code book. The apparently random
numbers were relayed by secure cable to teleprinters in the basement of the Old Administration
Building. Then the difficult part began: cracking the code.""
[Winter of the WorldI, Ken Follet]
This post argument is connected to the previous posts Secret Services & National Oganizations and SIS, aka MI6...A little bit of History, but also to the one related to Radio (Secret Services & Radio)
As usual for more specific information ccheck out both the links and the sources reported below...
Sources:
Multiples articles on both Theoretical (Foundamentals of Electromagnetism ) and Practical (Railway or Military Telegraphs) arguments
http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/tel/telhom.htm
Other sources:
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~smatei/435/techwiki/index.php?title=Morse_Code_and_the_Telegraphhttp://cw.hfradio.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/radio/morse/index.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy
http://www.nearfieldcommunicationnfc.net/nfc-telegraph-history.html
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