It’s always fun to learn neat things every once in awhile. In the past year, I pushed myself to learn how to knit, solve a rubik’s cube and whistle. Morse code has always been one of those things where it’d be cool to learn but:
1. It’s not exactly applicable to my daily life and,
2. It takes way too much brain power (seemingly), especially since memorizing isn’t a strong point of mine.
But then I thought: I may as well give it a try. It’s not everyday we have the time to learn these things.
To start off, I dived into the history of morse code and why it’s still used in modern time.
Morse code was named after Samuel F. B. Morse, the noted inventor of the telegraph. Within a telegraph, pulses of electrical current is sent through a wire to be received as a marked message on the other end. At the operator’s end, a button is pushed to activate these electrical pulses and on the receiving end, a device marks these patterns as dots and dashes on a piece of paper. These patterns were recognized sequences that formulated the Morse Code. Eventually, people found that it was much quicker to decode the message just by listening to the sound of the clicking patterns, rather than having to transcribe marked messages back into English.
The telegraph was a great substitute for current long distance communication at the time, which included smoke signals and drumbeats. This invention came about when methods of audio transmissions had not yet been discovered.
The original morse code created by Morse and his partners was slightly modified to make a Continental Code, which was constituted by Friedrich Clemens Gerke. In designing the code, a correlation between the duration (the time it takes to sound out the dots and dashes that a single letter is composed of) and use frequency of each letter was kept in mind. For instance, the letter “e” is most frequently used in the English language so it was given the shortest duration: a single dot. Less commonly used letters like “j” or ”q” were accordingly made longer, with additional dashes and such.
We can convey morse code in several forms. Tapping, blinking, flashing lights and of course audible beeping and written patterns. Single letters, numbers or punctuation are each consisted of a special sequence of dots and dashes. When reading the codes out loud, “dit” and “dah” are used respectively. Saying “dit” a few times in a row doesn’t sound as smooth as saying “dah” successively. In this case, the “dit” is further shortened into “di”. “Dit” then, is only used when there is a dot at the end of a sequence of dots and dashes. I realize this explanation seems confusing but to put this into context, let’s read out the letters “f” and “v”.
F → . . – .
Read as → di-di-dah-dit
V → . . . –
Read as → di-di-di-dah
So now we see that “dit” is only used for ending dots.
Although not strictly followed, it is said that the duration of a dash should be 3x as long as the duration of a dot. Between letters in a word, there should be a pause as long as a dot duration. Between the actual words, the pause extends to a duration of a dash.
Regular language convention with punctuations can result in excessively long messages so to make up for this, there are prosigns. Prosigns are much more complex and detailed for me to explain fully but from what I understand, they are special patterns for commonly used messages. In other words, they are standalone sequences that represents a word without the space between the letters in the word or abbreviation. Take SOS.
The signal should be . . . – – – . . .
It’s actually . . . – – – . . .
I’ve exaggerated the spacing in the first version to show that the only difference is that the spaces have been eliminated to make the second version. My example barely grazes the concept of prosigns but prosigns are worth a search if you’re interested.
There are two prominent methods of learning morse code that I came across: the Koch method and the Farnsworth method.
1. Koch method:
For this, you need a computer or trainer to send you messages. It or they will send you the morse coded messages at around 15-20 words per minute for 5 minutes (which is the typical speed a message is sent. At this rate, one dot is about half a second long). You copy down the character. Repeat this entire process until you’ve hit a 90% or higher accuracy in translating the message into letters. At this point, one character is added to each word and you go through the same steps as with two characters. Some argue that this method is much more efficient because you’re learning to read the code at regular speeds at all times and no long term practice is needed.
2. Farnsworth method:
With this method, you are still given the code at the same speed as the Koch method, except additional space is put between each character in a word. You learn to recognize the messages and decrease the spaces to make the overall messages faster when you pick up familiarity. It may be harder to speed up decoding but many prefer this method because it’s somewhat easier to pick up at first. It’s similar to most methods of learning morse code initially: learn each character at a slow rate and increase your pace of decoding with practice.
Besides these traditional methods, mnemonics in the form of phrases and pictures help us memorize the individual patterns associated with each character.
Some of my favourite mnemonics for letters are:
E = . = eh?
H = . . . . = hip-pi-ty hop
K = – . – = kang-a-roo
U = . . – = giddy up
/ = – . . – . = shave and a hair cut (catchy tune here)
After all of my research, I think learning morse code isn’t as difficult as I first thought. Picking up something new that may not seem particularly handy is still an inspiring process to experience. Honestly, there’s so much to learn and learning is a lifelong process. It’s important to always give something new a try and take everything one step at a time.