A short history of Morse code, and why people still use it
Morse code is older than the light bulb, the telephone and the fax machine, and it has outlived all three as a working skill. That is a strange thing for a 180-year-old technology. Here is how it started, and why it refuses to go away.
The first message
On 24 May 1844, Samuel Morse sat in a committee room of the U.S. Capitol and tapped out a line from the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought.” Forty miles away in Baltimore, his partner Alfred Vail read it off the wire and sent it straight back. The demonstration line between the two cities had cost the government $30,000, and plenty of people thought it was money down a hole. Within about ten years the country was laced with telegraph wire.
Who actually built the code
Morse got the name; Vail did a lot of the quiet work. The clever part of the code is that common letters get short signals and rare ones get long signals — E is a single dot, T a single dash, while Q and Z drag on. The story goes that Vail worked out which letters were common by walking into a local newspaper and counting the letters in the printers’ type cases, where the most-used letters filled the biggest bins. However the credit should be split, the result was a code you could send quickly and, crucially, learn to read by ear.
American Morse and International Morse
The original “American Morse” had some awkward habits — a few letters contained internal pauses, which got mangled on long or noisy lines. In 1865 a cleaned-up version was agreed in Europe, and this International Morse is the one the world settled on, especially once radio arrived. It is the version in this app and on the reference table.
Three letters at sea
Morse’s most famous signal was born on the water. Ships needed a distress call any operator would recognise instantly, and in 1906 an international conference in Berlin settled on . It does not stand for “Save Our Souls” — that came afterwards. It was chosen because it is short, symmetric and impossible to confuse with anything else. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its operators sent both the older CQD call and the newer SOS.
Onto the airwaves, and into two wars
Guglielmo Marconi pushed Morse off the wires and into the air. “Wireless telegraphy” let ships and shore stations talk without a cable, and for the first half of the twentieth century a radio operator with a straight key was standard kit on any serious ship or aircraft. Both world wars ran on Morse — for orders, for intelligence, and for the codebreakers trying to read the other side’s traffic.
The long goodbye
Teleprinters, telephones and then satellites slowly took over the jobs Morse used to do. The symbolic end came at sea. On 31 January 1997 the French Navy closed its Morse watch with a final transmission: “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.” Two years later the international maritime service formally switched to satellite distress calling. In the United States, the requirement to know Morse for an amateur radio licence was dropped in 2007.
Why it is still here
And yet it stays. Amateur radio operators still use Morse — they call it CW — because a trained ear can pull a Morse signal out of noise that would swallow a voice, using a fraction of the power and bandwidth. Aviation beacons still identify themselves in Morse; if you fly, the small VOR and NDB stations on the charts blink their two- and three-letter names in dots and dashes. It has found a second life in accessibility, too: someone who cannot use a keyboard can type with two switches, one for a dot and one for a dash, and in 2018 Google added a Morse keyboard to Gboard for exactly that. And it is still the signal of last resort. A torch, a mirror, a car horn, a tapped pipe — any of them can carry when nothing else will.
That is the real reason to learn it. Not because you will use it every day, but because it costs next to nothing to send and it gets through when the clever stuff has quit.
Keep going: browse the interactive alphabet, play with the translator, or get the app to practise properly.
More guides: Morse code vs the telegraph · Morse code beyond the Latin alphabet.