98 Fun Facts About Morse Code

Which inventor, a telegraph operator in his teens, nicknamed his first two children Dot and Dash?

Thomas Edison. Daughter Marion was Dot and Thomas Jr. was Dash, and the telegraph devices he went on to invent earned the money for his first laboratory.

Samuel Morse's telegraph marked dots and dashes on paper tape, but how did operators soon read messages instead?

By ear, from clicks. The receiver clicked as it dented the tape, and operators found they could write a message straight down from the sound, so the tape was dropped and a simple sounder took its place.

In Morse code, what marks the end of one word and the start of the next?

A longer pause. Words are split by a silence seven dots long, letters by three and the marks inside a letter by one, so a sender who hurries the gaps runs words together.

Which letter of the alphabet is a single dit in Morse?

E. As the most common letter in English it was given the shortest code of all, so the average message takes fewer taps to send.

Which Los Angeles landmark has a rooftop beacon that blinks the word 'Hollywood' in Morse code?

The Capitol Records Tower. Its spire has blinked the name since the round tower opened in 1956, though in 1992 it switched to tapping out 'Capitol 50' for the label's fiftieth birthday.

How were letter frequencies estimated when the Morse alphabet was being designed?

By counting a printer's stock of type. Printers keep most of the letters they use most, so the tallies showed which should get the shortest codes; whether Morse or his partner made the count is still argued over.

What had Samuel Morse originally planned to transmit instead of letters?

Numerals. Each number stood for a word in a numbered dictionary, so every message had to be looked up at both ends, a step that vanished once each letter got its own code.

In which 2019 Oscar-winning film does a man hiding in a secret bunker send Morse code with the house lights?

Parasite. The father flickers a light from the hidden cellar, copying a trick its previous occupant used, until his son spots the message from a hillside.

Which Clash song fades out on a guitar picking out SOS in Morse code?

London Calling. Mick Jones made the beeps on a guitar pickup, a literal distress call to end a song that warns of one disaster after another.

Which Mars rover's wheels press the letters JPL into the Martian soil in Morse code?

Curiosity. Its builders were told the wheels could not carry the laboratory's initials as plain letters, so they hid them in the dots and dashes its cameras use to gauge how far it has rolled.

Which ship picked up Titanic's Morse distress call and steamed through the night to rescue her survivors?

Carpathia. Its operator caught the call around midnight, and the Cunard liner raced through the ice field to pull about 700 survivors from the lifeboats.

Which French pioneer did Samuel Morse meet in 1839 before bringing his picture-making process to America?

Louis Daguerre. Morse published the first American account of the daguerreotype, opened a portrait studio in New York and taught the process to Mathew Brady, later famous as a Civil War photographer.

What message officially opened the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line on 24 May 1844?

What hath God wrought. The operator at the Baltimore end tapped the same words straight back to show they had arrived, and the paper tape of the message survives in the Library of Congress.

Which future university founder built Morse's first telegraph line after Congress voted $30,000 for it in 1843?

Ezra Cornell. He designed a plough to bury the wire in lead pipe, and when the buried line failed he strung it overhead on poles instead, the method telegraph lines kept.

What news reached Washington by telegraph on 1 May 1844, over an hour ahead of the train carrying it?

Henry Clay's Whig nomination. The wire then reached only to Annapolis Junction, 22 miles out, so the news from the Baltimore convention was taken off a train there and flashed ahead to the Capitol.

Samuel Morse was in Washington painting which hero of the American Revolution when his wife died suddenly in 1825?

Marquis de Lafayette. Morse was then a portrait painter, and by the time the news reached him and he got home to New Haven his wife had already been buried.

Which country first adopted SOS as a distress signal, on 1 April 1905?

Germany. Its 1905 radio rules ordered operators to use the pattern, and a conference in Berlin the next year picked it for the whole world.

SOS never stood for 'Save Our Souls', so why was that pattern chosen?

It is hard to mistake. Operators nicknamed the pattern SOS after the letters its dots and dashes happen to spell, and the 'Save Our Ship' readings were invented later still.

Which famous mail service shut down in October 1861, days after the first telegraph line linked America's two coasts?

The Pony Express. Its riders had cut coast-to-coast news to about ten days, but the wire carried it almost instantly, and the service closed after only 18 months.

Before SOS, which company gave its ships' wireless operators a three-letter distress call of its own?

Marconi International Marine. The firm leased out both the wireless sets and the men who worked them, so one company order set the rule aboard liners of many different shipping lines.

Before switching to SOS, Titanic's wireless operator Jack Phillips first sent which older distress call?

CQD. It was the second operator, Harold Bride, who suggested trying the new international signal as well, and from then on the two calls were sent in turn.

How does the SOS signal differ from the letters S, O and S?

It is sent without gaps. The original rules laid down one continuous string of dots and dashes and named no letters at all, so calling it SOS was only a handy way to remember it.

Which letter of the alphabet is sent in Morse code as one single dash?

T. As the second most common letter in English it was given one of the two shortest codes of all; M, by contrast, takes two dashes.

Which company, once America's telegraph giant, delivered its last telegram in 2006?

Western Union. After about 150 years, phone calls and email had made the telegram useless, and the firm that once ruled American telegraphy carried on as a money-transfer business.

Which word did American POW Jeremiah Denton blink in Morse code during a 1966 North Vietnamese TV interview?

TORTURE. He blinked it letter by letter while answering the interviewer, giving US Naval Intelligence its first clear confirmation of how American prisoners were being treated.

Which letter's Morse rhythm matches the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?

V. The BBC made the four notes its call-sign for broadcasts to occupied Europe, and Churchill took up V for Victory as a rallying sign.

As voice radio took over from Morse in the 1920s, which spoken word was chosen as the international distress call?

Mayday. It was picked in 1923 because it sounds like the French for 'help me', and because the S in SOS was hard to make out over a crackling voice channel.

What replaced Morse code as the worldwide system for ships' distress calls in 1999?

Satellite and automatic alerts. The Global Maritime Distress and Safety System sends a ship's alert to rescue centres ashore, so help no longer depends on a trained operator aboard another vessel hearing the call.

What happened to the first Atlantic telegraph cable weeks after it carried Queen Victoria's 1858 greeting?

Its signal died away. The current was feeble from the first day and by early September nothing got through, so a lasting link had to wait until 1866, when the steamship Great Eastern laid a new cable.

Samuel Morse ran, and lost, on an anti-immigrant ticket for which office?

Mayor of New York City. The inventor was also a leading anti-immigrant campaigner who wrote tracts warning of a Catholic plot against America, yet his 1836 run drew only 1,496 votes.

Which US agency dropped the Morse code test from every amateur radio licence in 2007?

The FCC. A 2003 world radio conference had let each country choose, and the American test, already cut to a slow five words a minute in 2000, was then dropped altogether.

Which symbol joined the official International Morse code in 2004?

The at sign. It never needed a Morse code of its own until email addresses made it essential, and operators call the new character the 'commat', short for commercial at.

Which rock band opens its instrumental 'YYZ' with Toronto airport's code tapped out in Morse?

Rush. Aviation beacons repeat their identifiers in slow Morse so pilots can check they are tuned to the right one, and the band built the piece's opening rhythm on the pattern for Toronto's YYZ.

What are mechanical semi-automatic Morse keyers informally called?

Bugs. Invented by Horace Martin, whose Vibroplex company dates from 1905, the key turns one sideways push into a string of evenly timed dots, so the operator's hand moves far less.

Which country's wartime 'Victory' five-cent coin carried a slogan in Morse code around its rim?

Canada. From 1943 the rim of its nickel spelled out 'We win when we work willingly' in dots and dashes, a design meant to spur the war effort at home.

What are the special unwritten procedural signals in Morse called?

Almost all also encode special characters such as + or =.

Radio amateurs sign off a Morse contact with the number 73, telegraph shorthand for what?

Best regards. The code dates from 1850s telegraph offices, where 73 first meant 'my love to you' before an 1859 company list of number codes toned it down to 'accept my compliments'.

Which tech company built Morse code typing into its phone keyboard in 2018 for people with limited mobility?

Google. Morse needs only two inputs, a dot and a dash, so someone who cannot manage a touchscreen can type with a pair of switches; the Gboard feature was shaped by a developer who has cerebral palsy.

Besides A–Z and 0–9, which single accented letter does ITU International Morse encode?

There is no distinction between upper and lower case.

Which famous aviator flew the Atlantic with no radio and no parachute, having left both behind to save weight?

Charles Lindbergh. The radios of 1927 were heavy and hard to work while flying alone, so he gave the weight to fuel and was out of contact for the whole 33-hour flight to France.

Who built the needle telegraph that became the first in commercial service, on a railway in the 1830s?

Cooke and Wheatstone. Their needles pointed at letters on a board, so railway staff needed no code at all, and the system was earning money years before Morse's first line opened.

The first radio signal reported to cross the Atlantic, in 1901, was which Morse letter, sent as three dots?

S. The inventor, listening in Newfoundland with an aerial held up by a kite, reported hearing it arrive from Cornwall, more than 2,000 miles away, though sceptics had said the earth's curve would stop the waves.

Samuel Morse's huge canvas of Old Master paintings in miniature shows a gallery of which museum?

The Louvre. Gallery of the Louvre won high praise from fellow artists when he exhibited it back in America, but the public stayed away and he sold it for about half his asking price.

The first official telegraph message of 1844 was chosen by a friend's young daughter from which source?

The Bible. Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the patent commissioner, picked the verse with her mother's help, and Morse credited her by name across the top of the tape.

Morse sent his first official telegram from a room in the Capitol that was then home to which institution?

The Supreme Court. The justices sat in the Capitol until their own building was finished in 1935, and Morse's invited guests gathered in their chamber to watch the message go to Baltimore.

Samuel Morse showed friends his telegraph in his studio at which Manhattan university, where he taught art?

New York University. In his rooms there he built his first telegraph receiver out of an artist's canvas stretcher, a painter's own tool turned into the frame of his invention.

Besides the telegraph, Samuel Morse built a machine for which task, only to find he could not patent it?

Cutting marble sculptures. His machine could carve three-dimensional figures in stone, but it infringed an 1820 design by Thomas Blanchard, so the patent was out of reach.

A bronze statue of Samuel Morse, unveiled in 1871 while he was still alive, stands in which New York park?

Central Park. Morse, then 80, took part in the celebrations, and the same day a farewell message in his name was telegraphed from New York to offices across the country.

Which phone maker's classic text-message alert beeps out the letters SMS in Morse code?

Nokia phones could beep S-M-S in Morse when a text arrived, and some could also tap out the company's advertising slogan as a message tone.

Which famous radio word comes from a single letter sent in Morse to mean 'received'?

Roger was the wartime spelling-alphabet name for R, so a telegrapher's one-letter acknowledgement became a spoken word in the Second World War.

Which word for a vaguely large number do dictionaries trace to Morse operators' slang for a dash?

Umpteen is traced to 'umpty', signallers' facetious name for a dash (a dot was 'iddy'), and First World War army slang spread it far beyond the signal office.

Which nickname for radio amateurs began as professional telegraphers' insult for clumsy Morse senders?

Hams was what skilled wire telegraphers called incompetent operators, and professional radio men later turned the jeer on hobbyists, who kept it.

In TV's Inspector Morse, composer Barrington Pheloung occasionally hid what in the score using Morse code?

The killer's name was sometimes spelled out in the music, Pheloung said, and he also planted innocent characters' names as red herrings.

Which space film has an astronaut send Morse code data through a wristwatch's second hand?

Interstellar has Cooper twitch the hand of the watch he left his daughter Murph, feeding her the data she needs to solve the gravity equation.

Which president kept visiting the War Department's telegraph office to read Morse dispatches from his generals?

Abraham Lincoln frequently visited the Military Telegraph office, where civilian cipher operators decoded battlefield messages during the Civil War.

Which Washington abbreviation was already in use by 1895 as time-saving shorthand among press telegraph operators?

POTUS was on the wires by 1895 and sits in the Phillips Code, a shorthand that let Morse operators rush news reports with fewer keystrokes.

Which country's army hid a Morse message in a pop song to tell jungle hostages that rescue was coming?

Colombia's army knew FARC guerrillas let captives listen to the radio, so in 2010 it commissioned a ballad with the code tucked in after the chorus.

Which letter is sent in Morse as three dashes, the longest letter made of dashes alone?

O is three dashes in a row, the drawn-out middle of the SOS distress call and the slowest of the five vowels to send.

Ships' Morse radio operators were known by which nickname, after the crackling transmitters of early wireless?

Sparks came from the spark-gap transmitters fitted in the early years of wireless at sea, and the nickname long outlived that technology.

Which army signalling device flashed Morse code over long distances using sunlight bounced off a mirror?

Heliograph networks reached their greatest extent in Arizona and New Mexico during the Apache Wars, and armies still issued the device in the Second World War.

Radio operators voice a Morse dot as 'dit', but which syllable do they say for a dash?

Dah copies the longer tone heard through a radio receiver, and a dot inside a letter is clipped to 'di', so the letter L is spoken di-dah-di-dit.

After the Titanic sank, American law required ships to carry two wireless operators so they could maintain what?

A continuous watch needed two men working in turns, and the 1912 amendment also demanded backup power able to run the set for four hours.

Wabun code is a Morse variant in which each signal stands for a syllable character of which language?

Japanese kana get their own Morse signals in Wabun code, so many of its patterns double as Latin letters with unrelated sounds.

Which electronic band's song 'Radioactivity' spells out its own title in beeps of Morse code?

Kraftwerk open and close the track with Morse spelling the title, and a final burst of code signs off with the band's own name.

American prisoners in Vietnam knocked messages through cell walls with which grid system, easier to learn than Morse?

The tap code needs only a five-by-five letter grid held in the head, so each letter is two bursts of knocks: one for its row, then one for its column.

In which alien-invasion blockbuster do the world's armed forces coordinate their counterattack using Morse code?

Independence Day has the US military contact other nations in Morse to organise a united aerial strike while a computer virus is flown up to the mothership.

Which aviation ground stations identify themselves to pilots by repeating a few letters in slow Morse code?

Navigation beacons such as VORs repeat a short identifier in Morse, and US charts print the dots and dashes beside each one so pilots need not know the code.

Which body-part word do Morse operators use for a sender's personal rhythm on the telegraph key?

Fist is the operators' name for it, and a key that swings side to side instead of up and down gives a sender's rhythm a noticeable swing.

Which nickname did telegraphers give the repetitive strain injury caused by years of pounding a Morse key?

Glass arm, also called telegraphers' paralysis, was a main reason operators adopted keys that moved from side to side instead of up and down.

Which British inventor gave his name to the hand-held shuttered lamp that navies use to flash Morse code?

Arthur Aldis patented a small hand-held design with an improved shutter, and warships kept flashing Morse into this century when radio silence was needed.

Radio amateurs sending Morse address any male operator, whatever his age, as OM, which is short for what?

Old man is the greeting whatever the operator's age, and in the same shorthand a wife is an XYL, a former young lady.

Which two-word term do radio amateurs use for an operator who has died, borrowed from a Morse sign-off?

Silent key comes from SK, the signal that ends a contact; as the last thing other operators heard from a station, it became the word for a death.

Which single letter, sent as dash-dot-dash, is the Morse signal inviting the other station to transmit?

K is the invitation to transmit in the ITU's list, the Morse way of saying go ahead once an operator has finished calling another station.

Which giant steamship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel laid the 1866 telegraph cable across the Atlantic?

Great Eastern was repurposed to lay underwater cable within a few years of entering service, and she brought the Atlantic line ashore in Newfoundland on 27 July 1866.

Samuel Morse developed his concept of a single-wire telegraph in 1832 while doing what?

Sailing home from Europe, Morse watched a fellow passenger from Boston demonstrate an electromagnet, and the idea took shape on board.

The first regular use of Morse radio in the air was aboard which type of craft?

Airships had the space to carry early radio's bulky equipment, and in 1910 a set aboard the airship America helped coordinate the rescue of its crew.

Which Q code, meaning 'I confirm receipt' in Morse shorthand, names the cards radio amateurs mail after a contact?

QSL cards are postcard-sized proof of a contact, and sent as a query the same three letters ask whether a transmission was received.

Telegraph operators could send Chinese text in Morse only after turning each character into what?

A four-digit number from 0000 to 9999 stood for each character, and senders could do the conversion themselves or pay a telegrapher a small fee.

International Morse, used everywhere except on North American landlines, also goes by which other name?

Continental code began in 1848 on a telegraph line out of Hamburg, and it did away with the unequal dashes and inner gaps of the American original.

Which partner of Samuel Morse, whose father owned a New Jersey ironworks, invented the first telegraph sending key?

Alfred Vail developed the system at his own expense for a quarter of the proceeds, yet Morse kept the patent rights to everything his partner devised.

Years before his telegraph, painter Samuel Morse helped found which New York institution for artists?

National Academy of Design grew out of a drawing association Morse formed with fellow artists, and he went on to serve as its president for almost twenty years.

Which poetic foot gives its name to the two-paddle Morse keys that send alternating dots and dashes when squeezed?

The iamb, a short beat followed by a long one, matches the dot-dash string a squeeze produces, so dual paddles are known as iambic keys.

Ships' radio-room clocks had red wedges marking three-minute quiet periods, twice an hour, kept for what purpose?

Listening for distress calls was compulsory at 15 and 45 minutes past each hour, when every station on the calling frequency had to fall quiet.

Which letter was given a brand-new International Morse code because the earlier Hamburg alphabet lumped it in with I?

J had no signal of its own because the earlier alphabet did not distinguish it from I, so the international code added dot-dash-dash-dash for it.

In International Morse, a rapid run of eight dots tells the listener that what has just happened?

A mistake was sent, the eight dots say; the ITU table lists the signal simply as 'Error', and it is the longest unbroken run of dots in the code.

Which letter is sent in Morse as four dots, the longest letter made of dots alone?

H is four dots, one more than S, and a fifth dot turns it into the figure 5.

Which American physicist, later first secretary of the Smithsonian, did the relay work behind Samuel Morse's telegraph?

Joseph Henry built an early electric relay in 1835, four years after rigging a bell that could be rung down a wire, a forerunner of the doorbell.

Which junior Titanic wireless operator, both feet injured, helped send survivor lists from the rescue ship?

Harold Bride was washed off the deck as it flooded and scrambled onto an upturned collapsible boat before going back to work at a wireless key.

Which US president and his cabinet were given a demonstration of Samuel Morse's telegraph in 1838?

Martin Van Buren saw it in the months after the first successful test over two miles of wire, yet Congress did not fund a line until 1843.

Which piece of punctuation is sent dot-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot in Morse and doubles as a request to repeat?

Question mark is the ITU's signal for a query and for asking that anything not understood be sent again, and its pattern reads the same backwards.

The Morse procedural signal dot-dash-dot-dot-dot asks the operator at the other end to do what?

Wait is the official meaning, and because International Morse has no ampersand of its own, the same signal has been proposed as an unofficial one.

Which drink do the Morse letters dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash and dash-dash spell out?

RUM is spelled by R (dot-dash-dot), U (dot-dot-dash) and M (dash-dash); played backwards, the U would turn into a D.

Radio amateurs often call Morse operation by which two letters, after the steady carrier that is keyed on and off?

CW stands for continuous wave, the unbroken signal a key chops into dots and dashes, and operators use the two terms almost interchangeably.

The original American version of Morse is also known by which nickname, after the industry that kept using it?

Railroad code, as landline Morse was known, lasted on American tracks until most lines phased out the telegraph in the mid-1950s.

The first message sent over Samuel Morse's telegraph, across two miles of wire in 1838, praised which virtue?

Patience was the theme: 'A patient waiter is no loser' ran through the wire at the Speedwell Iron Works in New Jersey on 6 January 1838.

Which punctuation mark does International Morse send as the pair dot-dash repeated three times over?

Full stop, or period, heads the ITU's punctuation table, and a comma takes just as long to send, at six elements.

Which nearby ship's only wireless operator had switched off his set and gone to bed before Titanic called for help?

Californian had stopped for the night surrounded by ice, and her operator Cyril Evans had tried to tell the Titanic so before he turned in.

Radio amateurs who send Morse on very low transmitter power name their pursuit after which Q code?

QRP began as the request to reduce power, and Morse suits it because the signal's energy is packed into a very narrow slice of the band.