Pull up a scan of a Civil War field telegram or a railroad train order from the 1890s and try to read it with a modern Morse chart. It falls apart within a word. The letter O is two dots. L is one enormous dash. Some characters look like they have a gap punched through … Read more
In the movies, Mayday, SOS and Pan-Pan get used interchangeably, usually by someone shouting into a handset. On a real radio they are three different instructions to everyone listening, and picking the wrong one either launches a helicopter you did not need or fails to get you the response you did. Two of them mean … Read more
Ask whether the military still uses Morse code and you get two wrong answers online. One says it vanished decades ago. The other says special forces still send secret, encrypted Morse over the radio. Neither is right. Morse does still have a real military job, but a narrow and specific one, and it has nothing … Read more
Morse code was built for the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. That worked for English, but not for the many languages written in other scripts. So as the telegraph spread, separate Morse systems grew up for them. This page gives the full, clean code tables for three of the most important: Wabun for Japanese … Read more
A Morse code tattoo hides a message in plain sight. To almost everyone it looks like a clean row of dots and dashes, but to you it spells a word, a name, or a phrase that means something. That is the appeal. The catch is that a Morse tattoo only works if the spacing is … Read more
Morse code has three timing methods you will run into: standard, Farnsworth, and Wordsworth. Beginners waste a lot of time trying to figure out which one to learn with, or worse, mixing them up. The good news is that the choice is simple once you know what each one is actually for. This page sorts … Read more
The code is named after Samuel Morse. The version you actually use today was mostly shaped by someone else, a German telegraph inspector named Friedrich Gerke. In 1848 he took the original American code apart and rebuilt it into the clean, two signal system that later became International Morse code. Here is who Gerke was, … Read more
Quick answer Morse code did reach prisoners of war, but not in the way films suggest. The most famous confirmed case is US Navy Commander Jeremiah Denton, who blinked the word TORTURE in Morse during a televised propaganda interview in Hanoi in 1966, giving American intelligence its first clear confirmation that POWs were being tortured. … Read more
Quick Answer: Morse code speed is measured in words per minute, and the “word” is a fixed reference rather than an average of real words. The two standard reference words are PARIS, which is exactly 50 time units long, and CODEX, which is 60 units. PARIS is the amateur radio standard and gives the formula … Read more
Quick AnswerMorse code speed is measured in words per minute, and the “word” is a fixed reference rather than an average of real words. The two standard reference words are PARIS, which is exactly 50 time units long, and CODEX, which is 60 units. PARIS is the amateur radio standard: CODEX is used where the … Read more
