February 7, 2026 • 34 mins
The telegraph and the communication system known as Morse code revolutionized the way we transmit information, but how did it get here? Join the guys as they explore the tragic life and time of Samuel Morse in this week's Classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to this week's classic episode, fellow Ridiculous Historians.
This one, to be quite honest with you, is going
to take some unexpected dark turns. Max, did you ever
learn Morse code?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (00:15):
God? Nopppep bepepepep right.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I might have just said something very dirty, or I
might have said nothing, probably the latter, but that something.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, Morse code is going to be familiar to a
certain contingent of our fellow Ridiculous historians. It is a
useful thing to know. No, it is maybe not as
common now as it used to be back in the day,
but the evolution of communication across the planet owes a
(00:51):
lot to the telegraph and to Morse code. This revolutionize
the way people transmit information. In today's classic episod, so
we are going to explore the life and times of
the man who invented the code in the first place,
a guy named Samuel Morse. Again, we cannot emphasize this enough.
(01:15):
This is kind of a bummer. Ridiculous History is a
production of iHeartRadio. Noel, did you ever have to learn
(01:47):
Morse Code?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
No? God, that was not a very interesting response. Let
me make something up. Yeah, totally. When I was in
cub Scouts and we went on a camping trip into
the wilderness, so we had to learn how to communicate
by tapping tree bark. Yeah, exactly, totally.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Well. When I was back in Boy Scouts, one of
the things that our troop leaders continually needled me about.
They're always like, Ben, you're good at knots, you can
find a way around in the woods. But you you
got to learn Morse code, buddy. It's just it's been
too long, you know what I mean. You're eleven, now
it's getting real. You got to learn Morse code. And
(02:28):
so eventually I learned Morse code, passed the test with it,
and then promptly forgot it.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, when you turn eleven, you get your first big
boy bike and you learn Morse code, right.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, And that's for late bloomers, not for early adopters
like our super producer Casey Pegram. Give them a hand, folks.
Today's episode is about Morse code, but more importantly, it's
about the Man himself.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
That's right, the Morseman, the Morsemen, not to be confused
with some sort of norseman.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
No, No, that's a hard mus Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, the man, the myth, the Morseman.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The Morseman, Samuel Morseman morse So Samuel Moose born in
April twenty seventh, seventeen ninety one. Today he is remembered
primarily for the code system that bears his name, morse Code.
And everyone knows what that is. Casey, could we get
just a little clip of how that would sound? You know?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Perfect?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So like a series of short beats and then long ones.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, and if you're really good at it, you can
do it. You know, I would do it more like
dot dot dash dot dot Dad. But if you're really
good and you can work one of those little flipper
paddle button things, you know that you see in the
old movies, you'd be more like brererep you know what
I mean. Like that's Morse code. A telegraph, Yeah, telegraph,
which he's also credited with. He didn't really invent it exactly,
(03:56):
but he improved upon a previous design and made it
much more useful in relaying information more or less instantaneously. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's the thing. So most inventions that we think of
as the huge game changing innovations, most of those are
not going to be made up by one person working
in isolation. You know what I mean multiple people exhibit
parallel thinking. It's a phrase you enjoy or you.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Know, the whole idea of standing on the shoulders of
giants and all that and improving, piggybacking on something that
has come before and making it better and making it
suit the times.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yes, that's correct. He he eventually improved, as you said,
on this existing telegraph technology, famously sending the first telegraph
message on May twenty fourth, eighteen forty four. But between
his first day on the planet and that moment where
he sends the first telegraph message, a lot of stuff happened,
(04:53):
and not all of it was particularly pleasant. In fact,
we could say that without great personal tragedy, Morse code
may not have ever come to be and.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Know and that first telegraph messag is that Morese sent
a little heavy, inn't it. It's a what hath God wrought?
That sounds sinister to me.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I like it. It's better than ahoi hoi.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That's true, ahoihoi, which was what famously mister Burns sent
on the first ever telephone call.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Right right so before Samuel Morse was known for his inventions,
way back when Morse was just a regular surname. This
guy had a completely different job, didn't.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
He He did. He went to Yale and when he
graduated was his degree in ben Did you catch that well?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
He studied several different things. He studied religious philosophy, mathematics,
and equestrian science.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Which is so interesting because he went into none of
those fields. Upon graduating from Yale, he became a quite
well regarded portrait paint and a piece that he did
I was not aware of this at all. His work
is pretty breathtaking. He has one piece called Dying Hercules
that has that kind of Caravaggio asque look of like
(06:12):
some of the Italian masters, like real charscuro lighting like
this dude is heavily ripped, massive pectorals and eight pack
kind of back in the throes of agony, leaning up
against some rocks as hercules holding up this kind of
like sheet as though were like a wing. And it's
really breathtaking, epic stuff. And he received some note from
(06:33):
that work and got some really pretty big name commissions
as a painter.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's interesting because this was a masterpiece early in his life.
It's typically called his early masterpiece. And just a side note,
he did a sculpture of this first and he based
the painting on that sculpture.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
That's pretty weird, right, I wasn't aware of that technique,
but I assume it's a common thing because this guy
was a big deal painter. He he ended up attracting
the attention of notable artists of the time, such as
Washington Alston, who wanted him to meet another artist named
Benjamin West and along with Morse's father, Alston arranged for
(07:14):
Morse to stay in England for three years to study painting,
and eventually, by the end of eighteen eleven he was
admitted to the Royal Academy and this is where he
began producing things like dying hercules. He has some portraits
that are in the National Portrait Gallery now, including a
self portrait.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and I believe he did one of James Madison
as well, and he was commissioned to paint a portrait
of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington in February of
eighteen twenty five. Oh, we also did John Adams and
James Monroe. And that was when, unfortunately, tragically, his wife
(07:58):
Lucretia fell deathly ill.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yes, she fell ill just a month after giving birth
to their third child, and she was located in new Haven, Connecticut,
and he was in Washington in February of eighteen twenty
five painting that portrait. So he dropped everything ran back
(08:22):
to New Haven as quickly as he could. Unfortunately, he
was too late, and his wife passed at the young
age of twenty five on February seventh, eighteen twenty five.
And at this point the only way that he could
receive notice of this would be through a written correspondence,
(08:42):
a letter through the post, or word of mouth, or
maybe somebody sending a courier, you know what I mean,
and Corvid of some kind, Yes, a Corvid courier. So
his father sent him a letter about his wife's illness,
and more did not receive this letter for several days.
(09:03):
He wrote to his wife two days after she had died,
unaware that she had passed from this earth, and he
was talking to her about the election of John Quincy
Adams as president, his meeting with Lafayette, and then by
the time he returned to New Haven, several days had
passed since her burial.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
What would have been from Washington, DC to New Haven,
Connecticut in those days, which would have been by train.
How do you have traveled?
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I wonder it's an interesting question. So the distance, if
you're talking just a straight flight, the distance would be
about Testain Corbett flies, Yeah, two hundred and seventy three
miles or four hundred and forty kilometers for the rest
of the world. So just for perspective, if someone were
traveling on a train today on Amtrak, for instance, how
long would that journey take?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
I think only about five and a half hours or so,
which kind of threw me because at first I when
I read this, I misread and thought he was much
farther away because he had spent a lot of time overseas,
but he was in fact not that far, but still
just the same, he needed the information instantly, and that
is what led him to decide he needed to devise
(10:15):
a way of doing this so other people wouldn't have
to experience what he experienced, because he wrote a letter
to his daughter after the passing of his wife that
was just really heartbreaking to read.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Right, he said, you cannot know the depth of the
wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your
dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has
been kept open and when he learned of their death,
he vowed to find some way to deliver important messages
in a timely manner, and he would spend the next
(10:49):
two decades perfecting this system.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
He didn't give up the art right away, but he
continued kind of tinkering away at this side hush at
the same time. And it was in eighteen thirty two,
when he was on another voyage sea voyage to Europe.
From Europe rather back to the United States, that he
met a very important gentleman for the evolution of what
(11:17):
would be his kind of crowning achievement.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yes, Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston physician and scientist. And
Jackson says to Morse, hey, check out this electromagnet I made.
He had a rudimentary electromagnet, and Morse was inspired. And
Morse thought, you know what, what if I could send
(11:40):
a message along a wire by opening and closing an
electrical circuit, and then an electro magnet could record these
blips on a piece of paper via some sort of
dare I say a code? And I like your thinking,
yeah right, And this is one of those I don't
(12:04):
know at first. It's like a cocktail Napkin idea. You know,
he's still what iffing to himself. But when he goes
back to the US, when he disembarks from the trip,
he moves forward with the idea and he meets another
guy who works with electromagnets, a fellow named Joseph Henry.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, and Joseph Henry was also working with the idea
of electromagnetism, which is just quick and dirty. I'm no
magnet scientist, but it is the idea of passing electric
current into a magnet that turns on and off its
magnetic abilities, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I mean I'm not a magnet doctor either, but I
like that phrase. But yeah, that's the basic gist. At
this time, Morse still doesn't absolutely understand the nuts and
bolts of how electro magnetism works. And it is Henry
(13:03):
who explains the phenomenon of electromagnetism to Morse, and he
also shows him the experimental electromagnets that he has built.
And if you look at the electromagnets Morse later goes
on to use and the experimental ones that Joseph Henry created,
(13:23):
they're obviously the same design. He's well, you don't want
to call it plagiarism. But he's riffing well, but he
did sue, I believe, yeah, yeah, later he did sue
and said, hey, that's my idea. You can you can
read some of this, by the way, in a fantastic
Smithsonian article called How Samuel Morse Got His Big Idea
(13:45):
by Joseph Stromberg, And the Smithsonian has written a couple
of things about the story of Morse because I don't
remember if we've mentioned this on area yet. Joseph Henry
would later go on to become the first Secretary of
the Smithsonian Institution. They have a little bit of stake
in the game here story wise. So before he gets sued,
(14:06):
Morse and Henry are pretty good buds. They're having interesting conversations.
Morse goes back to his home, which is now in
New York, and in eighteen thirty seven he creates his
first telegraph receiver.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
It's, like I said, is kind of that thing you
see in some of these old, the old pictures where
it's like a button exactly on a spring and that
clopens and closes the circuit to the decay. Yeah, when
you need the taps, that's right, And that is pretty
much what it looked like and it got sort of
streamlined over time, and you can actually see this first
(14:40):
ever version, this prototype today at the American History Museum.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And according to Harold Wallace, the curator of the American
History Museum, the most interesting aspect of this is that
he took an artist canvas stretcher and made it into
a telegraph receiver. A canvas stretcher is what you use
to stretch the canvas over a frame and a fixation.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
So he was kind of given props to his old
arts roots.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And to Wallace, this is symbolic of a shift from
painter to telegrapher, all in one piece, one artifact. That's
pretty cool, somewhat poetic. Right. So now he theoretically has
a way to record these signals, and he has to
figure out how to transmit them. Right. Yeah, he builds
the receiver first, but he doesn't build a way to
(15:29):
transmit it.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So was the infrastructure already in place for this, because
I mean this is obviously pre telephone.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Right, He had to work with some other people and
this is where his colleagues Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail
come into play. Over the next few years, after building
this receiver, Morse, still, a man on a mission, works
to improve this system, and he uses Veil's transmitter key
and a code of dots and dashes. This would be
(15:57):
what becomes known as Morse code. And initially people said, okay,
it could be potentially useful, but they had a hard
time getting investors because of the infrastructure problem that you
alluded to earlier. There's not a pre existing network of
(16:17):
miles and miles and miles of wire. You would have
to build it to send that signal. And that's something
that we see with a lot of technology. One of
the things people are talking about today with autonomous vehicles
is how do you build a system in which they
can exist?
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's right, and so in the same way that we're
doing small scale tests of autonomous vehicles in private in
these private companies and then gradually doing road tests, some
of which have spectacularly failed, they did that very thing
to demonstrate to potential investors that this technology did work
using short runs of wires instead of the kind that
would have been strung miles and miles apart to make
(16:53):
the technology actually useful across long distances.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, that's a part of the story that I found
endearing they turned to Uncle Sam. They asked the US
government for some scratch, some cheddar, some sweet sweet telegraph
money just to construct this network, to lay these lines,
to make this wire stuff happen. And the way that
(17:17):
they convinced the government to fund it was through this
sort of science fair approach. They did a live demonstration
within the Capitol and they strung wires up just between
different rooms.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You know what makes me think of there's a part
in the new Red Dead Redemption game where the character
you play, the cowboy I can't remember his name for
some reason, now, Arthur Morgan. Arthur Morgan, great game if
you haven't played it. He happens upon an inventor who
has these remote control boats that are like little battleship
kind of things that can like, you know, shoot missiles.
(17:49):
And the whole idea is that he wants to get
investors and he rounds up rich people that are like
walking around in the city that you're in to come
and check out him using this wireless technolog And that
was sort of a time. It was just at the
same time, around the late eighteen hundreds or mid eighteen hundreds,
and it was a time of that kind of ingenuity.
When people were so far ahead of like what investors
(18:10):
were willing to put their money toward, you had to
really wow them with some kind of display that they
it was unequivocally a thing that was going to work
and that was worth their money.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, and so they put some cash behind it. They
gave Morse and Co. Thirty thousand dollars to build a
thirty eight mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington, DC.
And then on May one, oh, should we inflation calculate that?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We think, Oh, of course, whatever we can, we should.
I'm going to guess one million dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So let's say, just for the sake of argument, let's
say eighteen forties dollars. And we said, what was that?
Thirty thousand? Okay, so thirty thousand dollars in the eighteen
forties would be equal. Well, two, what did you guess?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
One million dollars?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Dude, you're really close. It's nine hundred and eighty thousand,
four and eighty dollars.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Awesome. What do I win?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
A peace of mind?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I'll take it, Okay, I need it.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, dude, I'm sure we have a T shirt somewhere.
A ridiculous history T shirt.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I'm not gonna be one of those guys in the
band wearing their own shirt. That's embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I would wear a Casey on the K shirt.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Oh, I absolutely would. That's different though, that that represents
the good mister Pegram, not our own.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Do we talk about this on air? I pitched Casey
on getting a T shirt with just his face on it.
You were against that, right?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah? Yeah? I think so. I'm going to say a
note to that one. Oh man, Casey on the sad
sad case Well, you know what, Hey, how about this, listeners, Yeah,
you guys speak up, let us know, demand it, Demand
Casey's face on a T shirt. Then we'll see if
he changes his tune. Oh, we're gonna be in deep
trouble on that one. Huh so oh yeah. So they
(20:04):
strung up the line, Yeah, probably along a similar route
as there would have been a train travel I imagine.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That would make sense, right, that's a good point. It
really gets national attention when the device is used by
the Whig Party to telegraph their presidential nomination from Baltimore, Maryland,
to Washington, d C. Much much faster than an ordinary
courier could have traveled and people say, holy smokes, building
(20:32):
this wires is real pain. Once you have the wire up,
this is very useful.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, and it makes me think of those barbed wire
telephone networks because all you need is a conductive material.
There's something special about it just has to travel from
point A to point B and it can transmit those messages.
And it's so cool because I mean, it makes sense,
but I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms.
You know, in my head, the invention of the telegraph
was so far removed from the inventor of the telephone.
(20:59):
But that's how how technology works when you're building on
the work of others. Antonio Meucci, who was an Italian immigrant,
started developing what was referred to as the talking telegraph
as early as eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We see the concurrence or the confluence rather of these
similar technologies.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Oh, speaking of your parallel thinking, the Italian gentleman I
just mentioned came up with his design completely independently of
Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with the invention. So
it just goes to show like it's totally a thing
that happens.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
It's first to the patent office. Sometimes that's the way
it works. Right. So Morris has finally achieved his mission,
and almost twenty years later, nineteen twenty years later, he
has not put his tragedy to rest, but he has
made something positive in the world from this terrible personal catastrophe.
(21:56):
And that brings us to the question that we have
to ask, would Morse code or would the telegraph have
existed without this man on personal mission? The answer is yes,
it just wouldn't be Morse code. We've been throwing around
the phrase Morse code and we said they're dots and dashes.
(22:19):
What exactly is Morse code? It changed a little over time, right.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
It did change a little bit over time, because, like
we said, you know, he had this invention that he
had worked with these other inventors to achieve, including Alfred Vail,
who invented his contribution to the device, which was the
telegraph key, which is literally that little button that we've
been talking about that allows you to like enter in
the code. But Morse himself was credited with coming up
(22:46):
with a system of dots, as in a short beep
and then a long beep beep versus beep, and with
those it's sort of like a Braille alphabet, but for
your ears instead of your fingers right.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Right, And he created this code with some inspiration from
earlier attempts to communicate even just line of sight over
distance through visual cues, you know, semaphore kind of stuff.
Yet a controversy exists. If you look at International Morse
Code now we still call it Morse code, you'll see
that that fairly easy to grock system dots and dashes.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Or ditson does as it's referred to in the parlance
of Morse coderie.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes, and I like the phrase coderie. However, many scholars
will tell you that Morse code is misnamed and it
should actually be called Veil code due to the contributions
of Alfred Vail, who collaborated with Samuel Morse. So many
scholars will say that Veil, as a collaborator, was the
(23:49):
generative force behind what we call Morse code. However, people
who say that Morse invented it himself will point out
that Veil in public and private claimed he invented the code,
and he credited Samuel Morse with the creation of the
code in different private correspondence. So if you want to
(24:10):
be a revolutionary academic, you can you can argue the
veil side of it. It's just many people attribute Morse
code to Samuel Morse, including Alfred Vail.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, and I actually had the misconception that Morse code
was sort of the way you would enter in letters
alpha numerically, like in a telephone where you know each
however many you know A is one dot, B is two,
C is three. But if you think about it in
a whole sentence, if you keep things in one letter
at a time like that, it would take ages to
(24:43):
communicate any meaningful information. Right, So there's a whole other
system that makes Morse code efficient and able to have
high words per minutent counts, which is how Morse code
transmissions are measured. But I have to say, Ben, even
after reading into this stuff, maybe I'm being a little
dense here, I still don't fully get like how the
(25:03):
code works. Because if an S is an sos is
three dits, an O is three dos and S is
three dits, how does that relate to other letters? Or
is it a phrase based like maybe you can acca.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
So think of it in terms of units, So a
dit or dot think of it as one unit, almost
like music, Okay, and a dash is three units, so
dot and then a dash is got it for lack
of a better vocal cue, The space between parts of
(25:37):
the same letter would be one unit, so there's one
dits space between these dits and these dos. And the
space between separate letters is three units, so there's a
three unit space between every letter that you send out.
So when an sos, you would have that dit and
(25:58):
then a space for the span of three other dits.
So people would say, Okay, that's stopped, that's an S
and then where is that why? On telegrams they say
stop now, I'm sorry, keep going. But the the the
space between words would be seven units, so they're they're
(26:19):
counting not just the dits or the das, but they're
counting the absence of those, and they they can figure
out from the spaces between letters or words what a
phrase is supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I see. And also if I'm looking at this chart
of the alphabet and the number system one through ten
or one through nine and zero, it's a little easy
than you might think. A is dit do B is
dot dit dit dit C is da di da dit
I like saying do dit it's fine, d is da
dit dit E is just one dit f is dit
dit do dit?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
And going back to your question, why is it not
a dit for one? Dit dit for two? Did dit
for three? I feel like a beats about to drop,
but one is actually did da da da seems long
for one?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
It does. And what we're talking about right now, this
code that we're reading back to you is what became
known as International Morris Code and it was adopted by
the international community because incorporated the Latin alphabet with some
extra Latin letters and also Arabic numerals and some punctuation
and some other symbols that were not accounted for in
(27:29):
Morris's original code. So over time Morse's basis for Morse
Code got phased out and it actually ended up not
even being the original Morse code that Morris created that
kind of took hold and got adopted by the international community.
It was this International Morse Code that was developed by
Frederick Clemens Girk, who was a German writer and journalist
(27:51):
and also someone that was very interested in telegraphy, and
he revised that Morse Code to make it make more sense,
include more necessary care that could be adopted more widely.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, So ten years after that first telegraph line opens
in eighteen forty four, there were over twenty three thousand
miles of line or wire crossing the continent and it
hit a watershed moment as various businesses that required quick,
long distance communication began to use telegraph systems. Railroad companies
(28:25):
were one of the first to the plate there they
would use it to communicate between their stations, and these
telegraph companies began to pop up everywhere that you could imagine.
While this was happening, countries in Europe were developing their
own system of Morse code. And the code used in
America was called American Morse Code or Railroad Morse, and
(28:47):
the code used in Europe was called Continental Morse. And
so that's when that's when they realized they need to
standardize this stuff, as you pointed out, with something that
everyone can agree on. And one of the things that
brought this need for an international code to public attention
was the use of radio communication, invented in the eighteen nineties, right,
(29:11):
and radio frequencies got longer and longer and longer, it
became possible to communicate internationally. And that's when they realized, Okay,
if we're talking about a global level of communication. We
all have to more or less be speaking the same language.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
That's right, and as technology tends to do, it was
subsumed by the next best thing, which became the telephone
or the talking telegraph, and then radio communication or wireless right,
because you didn't have to have the infrastructure. It was
all just done on radio waves. Yeah. That was adopted
by the military for communicating between you know, planes and such.
(29:49):
And even though like for example, amateur radio enthusiasts still
use Morse code, it's a little bit more of kind
of a quirky holdover from the past. I believe, Ben,
you were telling me that pilots and the military personnel
had to learn Morse code up until I think the nineties, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Up until the nineteen nineties, pilots were required to know
how to communicate using Morse code, and up until two
thousand and seven, if you wanted to get an amateur
radio license, you had to pass a Morse code proficiency test.
But you're right, the average person today is probably not
going to communicate in Morse code, and they're probably not
(30:32):
going to know it. Most of us wouldn't know Morse code.
I mean, I admitted at the beginning of the show
that I promptly forgot it after getting whatever merit badge
I was gunning for. And believe it or not, man
American morse code, the railroad morse code is still around.
It's nearly extinct, but it's still around. And one group
(30:56):
of people who are keeping it alive might surprise you, sure,
amateur radio operators. I feel like that that's an easy one.
Civil war reenactors say, what civil war reenactors keep American
morse code alive?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Interesting? And one that I hadn't thought about is or
something we haven't even discussed at all, is that you
can also transmit morse code visually through flashes of light
and at sea to communicate between ships or for a
ship to communicate with shore. They have these lamps that
have shutters on them. They can flash codes to, you know,
to the shore, so you can actually get messages back
(31:31):
to shore by line of sight.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
And military personnel POW's have used Morse code through blinking
to communicate the true nature of their situation in.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Propaganda videos, so it's got all kinds of uses. Still.
Not to mention young lads banging on tree stumps in
the forest, Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yes, it's a huge industry nowadays, and that's our story.
There is a point though, that we should make, and
that is that the telegraph system or something like it
would have developed without Samuel Morse because so many people
were working on something similar. However, his personal mission, his
(32:13):
passion to save other people from the situation that he
himself encountered, played a huge role in the timing of
Morse code for it to become a thing when it did.
It may have taken a little bit longer had one
man not been so emotionally and personally driven to pursue
this innovation. And you know what I say, thanks, because
(32:37):
we couldn't have had a podcast if things like Morse
code and telegraphs and later radio never existed.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I mean, certainly like one of the earliest forms of
long distance communication that served as the basis for It's
just like the spark of an idea. So hey, what
if I could communicate an idea or a thought or
a message from point A to point B. That's literally
what podcasting and broadcasting a media of any kind is.
It's all a jumping off from that simple idea.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
One day we should tell the story of Farnsworth, the
inventor of television. You know he got that idea when
he was a fourteen year old farmhand. Hmm, well, story
for another day. I like it, and we've got to say,
maybe we should go back re record this entire episode
in worse code.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
What do you think? Yeah, I don't know about that.
I'll think it over.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Let us know your thoughts on worse code. Feel free
to write to us in morse code if you wish.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on I almost said Amazon. I don't know if you
can find us in Amazon, but we're definitely on Twitter,
and you can find us collectively and individually on Instagram.
I am at Ben Bullen.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I am at Embryonic Insider. You can check out our
community page on Facebook, The Ridiculous Historians, where you can
drop your history memes and hang out with your fellow
podcast fans enthusiasts and check us out next time when
we explore the weird story of how a stray dog
caused a war, It's true in the meantime thanks to
our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Casey, I want to make eye contact with you and
apologize for bringing up the Casey face t shirt again.
But now the more I say the phrase, the more
I'm feeling it. So I don't know if this puts
us on opposite sides of history, but I hope we
remain friends.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
We'll see you ends up on the right side of history.
Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme and is
always on the right side of history and the right
side of our hearts, along with Gabe, our research associate,
and you Ben.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
And to you as well, Noel, and you know what
to you, Samuel Moose.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Here you go. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome back to this week's classic episode, fellow Ridiculous Historians.
This one, to be quite honest with you, is going
to take some unexpected dark turns. Max, did you ever
learn Morse code?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (00:15):
God? Nopppep bepepepep right.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I might have just said something very dirty, or I
might have said nothing, probably the latter, but that something.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah, Morse code is going to be familiar to a
certain contingent of our fellow Ridiculous historians. It is a
useful thing to know. No, it is maybe not as
common now as it used to be back in the day,
but the evolution of communication across the planet owes a
(00:51):
lot to the telegraph and to Morse code. This revolutionize
the way people transmit information. In today's classic episod, so
we are going to explore the life and times of
the man who invented the code in the first place,
a guy named Samuel Morse. Again, we cannot emphasize this enough.
(01:15):
This is kind of a bummer. Ridiculous History is a
production of iHeartRadio. Noel, did you ever have to learn
(01:47):
Morse Code?
Speaker 2 (01:49):
No? God, that was not a very interesting response. Let
me make something up. Yeah, totally. When I was in
cub Scouts and we went on a camping trip into
the wilderness, so we had to learn how to communicate
by tapping tree bark. Yeah, exactly, totally.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Well. When I was back in Boy Scouts, one of
the things that our troop leaders continually needled me about.
They're always like, Ben, you're good at knots, you can
find a way around in the woods. But you you
got to learn Morse code, buddy. It's just it's been
too long, you know what I mean. You're eleven, now
it's getting real. You got to learn Morse code. And
(02:28):
so eventually I learned Morse code, passed the test with it,
and then promptly forgot it.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah, when you turn eleven, you get your first big
boy bike and you learn Morse code, right.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Right, And that's for late bloomers, not for early adopters
like our super producer Casey Pegram. Give them a hand, folks.
Today's episode is about Morse code, but more importantly, it's
about the Man himself.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
That's right, the Morseman, the Morsemen, not to be confused
with some sort of norseman.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
No, No, that's a hard mus Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Yeah, the man, the myth, the Morseman.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
The Morseman, Samuel Morseman morse So Samuel Moose born in
April twenty seventh, seventeen ninety one. Today he is remembered
primarily for the code system that bears his name, morse Code.
And everyone knows what that is. Casey, could we get
just a little clip of how that would sound? You know?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Perfect?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
So like a series of short beats and then long ones.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Yeah, and if you're really good at it, you can
do it. You know, I would do it more like
dot dot dash dot dot Dad. But if you're really
good and you can work one of those little flipper
paddle button things, you know that you see in the
old movies, you'd be more like brererep you know what
I mean. Like that's Morse code. A telegraph, Yeah, telegraph,
which he's also credited with. He didn't really invent it exactly,
(03:56):
but he improved upon a previous design and made it
much more useful in relaying information more or less instantaneously. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's the thing. So most inventions that we think of
as the huge game changing innovations, most of those are
not going to be made up by one person working
in isolation. You know what I mean multiple people exhibit
parallel thinking. It's a phrase you enjoy or you.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Know, the whole idea of standing on the shoulders of
giants and all that and improving, piggybacking on something that
has come before and making it better and making it
suit the times.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yes, that's correct. He he eventually improved, as you said,
on this existing telegraph technology, famously sending the first telegraph
message on May twenty fourth, eighteen forty four. But between
his first day on the planet and that moment where
he sends the first telegraph message, a lot of stuff happened,
(04:53):
and not all of it was particularly pleasant. In fact,
we could say that without great personal tragedy, Morse code
may not have ever come to be and.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Know and that first telegraph messag is that Morese sent
a little heavy, inn't it. It's a what hath God wrought?
That sounds sinister to me.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I like it. It's better than ahoi hoi.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
That's true, ahoihoi, which was what famously mister Burns sent
on the first ever telephone call.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Right right so before Samuel Morse was known for his inventions,
way back when Morse was just a regular surname. This
guy had a completely different job, didn't.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
He He did. He went to Yale and when he
graduated was his degree in ben Did you catch that well?
Speaker 1 (05:44):
He studied several different things. He studied religious philosophy, mathematics,
and equestrian science.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Which is so interesting because he went into none of
those fields. Upon graduating from Yale, he became a quite
well regarded portrait paint and a piece that he did
I was not aware of this at all. His work
is pretty breathtaking. He has one piece called Dying Hercules
that has that kind of Caravaggio asque look of like
(06:12):
some of the Italian masters, like real charscuro lighting like
this dude is heavily ripped, massive pectorals and eight pack
kind of back in the throes of agony, leaning up
against some rocks as hercules holding up this kind of
like sheet as though were like a wing. And it's
really breathtaking, epic stuff. And he received some note from
(06:33):
that work and got some really pretty big name commissions
as a painter.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
It's interesting because this was a masterpiece early in his life.
It's typically called his early masterpiece. And just a side note,
he did a sculpture of this first and he based
the painting on that sculpture.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
That's pretty weird, right, I wasn't aware of that technique,
but I assume it's a common thing because this guy
was a big deal painter. He he ended up attracting
the attention of notable artists of the time, such as
Washington Alston, who wanted him to meet another artist named
Benjamin West and along with Morse's father, Alston arranged for
(07:14):
Morse to stay in England for three years to study painting,
and eventually, by the end of eighteen eleven he was
admitted to the Royal Academy and this is where he
began producing things like dying hercules. He has some portraits
that are in the National Portrait Gallery now, including a
self portrait.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and I believe he did one of James Madison
as well, and he was commissioned to paint a portrait
of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington in February of
eighteen twenty five. Oh, we also did John Adams and
James Monroe. And that was when, unfortunately, tragically, his wife
(07:58):
Lucretia fell deathly ill.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yes, she fell ill just a month after giving birth
to their third child, and she was located in new Haven, Connecticut,
and he was in Washington in February of eighteen twenty
five painting that portrait. So he dropped everything ran back
(08:22):
to New Haven as quickly as he could. Unfortunately, he
was too late, and his wife passed at the young
age of twenty five on February seventh, eighteen twenty five.
And at this point the only way that he could
receive notice of this would be through a written correspondence,
(08:42):
a letter through the post, or word of mouth, or
maybe somebody sending a courier, you know what I mean,
and Corvid of some kind, Yes, a Corvid courier. So
his father sent him a letter about his wife's illness,
and more did not receive this letter for several days.
(09:03):
He wrote to his wife two days after she had died,
unaware that she had passed from this earth, and he
was talking to her about the election of John Quincy
Adams as president, his meeting with Lafayette, and then by
the time he returned to New Haven, several days had
passed since her burial.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
What would have been from Washington, DC to New Haven,
Connecticut in those days, which would have been by train.
How do you have traveled?
Speaker 1 (09:32):
I wonder it's an interesting question. So the distance, if
you're talking just a straight flight, the distance would be
about Testain Corbett flies, Yeah, two hundred and seventy three
miles or four hundred and forty kilometers for the rest
of the world. So just for perspective, if someone were
traveling on a train today on Amtrak, for instance, how
long would that journey take?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
I think only about five and a half hours or so,
which kind of threw me because at first I when
I read this, I misread and thought he was much
farther away because he had spent a lot of time overseas,
but he was in fact not that far, but still
just the same, he needed the information instantly, and that
is what led him to decide he needed to devise
(10:15):
a way of doing this so other people wouldn't have
to experience what he experienced, because he wrote a letter
to his daughter after the passing of his wife that
was just really heartbreaking to read.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Right, he said, you cannot know the depth of the
wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your
dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has
been kept open and when he learned of their death,
he vowed to find some way to deliver important messages
in a timely manner, and he would spend the next
(10:49):
two decades perfecting this system.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
He didn't give up the art right away, but he
continued kind of tinkering away at this side hush at
the same time. And it was in eighteen thirty two,
when he was on another voyage sea voyage to Europe.
From Europe rather back to the United States, that he
met a very important gentleman for the evolution of what
(11:17):
would be his kind of crowning achievement.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yes, Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston physician and scientist. And
Jackson says to Morse, hey, check out this electromagnet I made.
He had a rudimentary electromagnet, and Morse was inspired. And
Morse thought, you know what, what if I could send
(11:40):
a message along a wire by opening and closing an
electrical circuit, and then an electro magnet could record these
blips on a piece of paper via some sort of
dare I say a code? And I like your thinking,
yeah right, And this is one of those I don't
(12:04):
know at first. It's like a cocktail Napkin idea. You know,
he's still what iffing to himself. But when he goes
back to the US, when he disembarks from the trip,
he moves forward with the idea and he meets another
guy who works with electromagnets, a fellow named Joseph Henry.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, and Joseph Henry was also working with the idea
of electromagnetism, which is just quick and dirty. I'm no
magnet scientist, but it is the idea of passing electric
current into a magnet that turns on and off its
magnetic abilities, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I mean I'm not a magnet doctor either, but I
like that phrase. But yeah, that's the basic gist. At
this time, Morse still doesn't absolutely understand the nuts and
bolts of how electro magnetism works. And it is Henry
(13:03):
who explains the phenomenon of electromagnetism to Morse, and he
also shows him the experimental electromagnets that he has built.
And if you look at the electromagnets Morse later goes
on to use and the experimental ones that Joseph Henry created,
(13:23):
they're obviously the same design. He's well, you don't want
to call it plagiarism. But he's riffing well, but he
did sue, I believe, yeah, yeah, later he did sue
and said, hey, that's my idea. You can you can
read some of this, by the way, in a fantastic
Smithsonian article called How Samuel Morse Got His Big Idea
(13:45):
by Joseph Stromberg, And the Smithsonian has written a couple
of things about the story of Morse because I don't
remember if we've mentioned this on area yet. Joseph Henry
would later go on to become the first Secretary of
the Smithsonian Institution. They have a little bit of stake
in the game here story wise. So before he gets sued,
(14:06):
Morse and Henry are pretty good buds. They're having interesting conversations.
Morse goes back to his home, which is now in
New York, and in eighteen thirty seven he creates his
first telegraph receiver.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
It's, like I said, is kind of that thing you
see in some of these old, the old pictures where
it's like a button exactly on a spring and that
clopens and closes the circuit to the decay. Yeah, when
you need the taps, that's right, And that is pretty
much what it looked like and it got sort of
streamlined over time, and you can actually see this first
(14:40):
ever version, this prototype today at the American History Museum.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And according to Harold Wallace, the curator of the American
History Museum, the most interesting aspect of this is that
he took an artist canvas stretcher and made it into
a telegraph receiver. A canvas stretcher is what you use
to stretch the canvas over a frame and a fixation.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
So he was kind of given props to his old
arts roots.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
And to Wallace, this is symbolic of a shift from
painter to telegrapher, all in one piece, one artifact. That's
pretty cool, somewhat poetic. Right. So now he theoretically has
a way to record these signals, and he has to
figure out how to transmit them. Right. Yeah, he builds
the receiver first, but he doesn't build a way to
(15:29):
transmit it.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
So was the infrastructure already in place for this, because
I mean this is obviously pre telephone.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Right, He had to work with some other people and
this is where his colleagues Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail
come into play. Over the next few years, after building
this receiver, Morse, still, a man on a mission, works
to improve this system, and he uses Veil's transmitter key
and a code of dots and dashes. This would be
(15:57):
what becomes known as Morse code. And initially people said, okay,
it could be potentially useful, but they had a hard
time getting investors because of the infrastructure problem that you
alluded to earlier. There's not a pre existing network of
(16:17):
miles and miles and miles of wire. You would have
to build it to send that signal. And that's something
that we see with a lot of technology. One of
the things people are talking about today with autonomous vehicles
is how do you build a system in which they
can exist?
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's right, and so in the same way that we're
doing small scale tests of autonomous vehicles in private in
these private companies and then gradually doing road tests, some
of which have spectacularly failed, they did that very thing
to demonstrate to potential investors that this technology did work
using short runs of wires instead of the kind that
would have been strung miles and miles apart to make
(16:53):
the technology actually useful across long distances.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, that's a part of the story that I found
endearing they turned to Uncle Sam. They asked the US
government for some scratch, some cheddar, some sweet sweet telegraph
money just to construct this network, to lay these lines,
to make this wire stuff happen. And the way that
(17:17):
they convinced the government to fund it was through this
sort of science fair approach. They did a live demonstration
within the Capitol and they strung wires up just between
different rooms.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
You know what makes me think of there's a part
in the new Red Dead Redemption game where the character
you play, the cowboy I can't remember his name for
some reason, now, Arthur Morgan. Arthur Morgan, great game if
you haven't played it. He happens upon an inventor who
has these remote control boats that are like little battleship
kind of things that can like, you know, shoot missiles.
(17:49):
And the whole idea is that he wants to get
investors and he rounds up rich people that are like
walking around in the city that you're in to come
and check out him using this wireless technolog And that
was sort of a time. It was just at the
same time, around the late eighteen hundreds or mid eighteen hundreds,
and it was a time of that kind of ingenuity.
When people were so far ahead of like what investors
(18:10):
were willing to put their money toward, you had to
really wow them with some kind of display that they
it was unequivocally a thing that was going to work
and that was worth their money.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, and so they put some cash behind it. They
gave Morse and Co. Thirty thousand dollars to build a
thirty eight mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington, DC.
And then on May one, oh, should we inflation calculate that?
Speaker 2 (18:39):
We think, Oh, of course, whatever we can, we should.
I'm going to guess one million dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
So let's say, just for the sake of argument, let's
say eighteen forties dollars. And we said, what was that?
Thirty thousand? Okay, so thirty thousand dollars in the eighteen
forties would be equal. Well, two, what did you guess?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
One million dollars?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Dude, you're really close. It's nine hundred and eighty thousand,
four and eighty dollars.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Awesome. What do I win?
Speaker 1 (19:10):
A peace of mind?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I'll take it, Okay, I need it.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, dude, I'm sure we have a T shirt somewhere.
A ridiculous history T shirt.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I'm not gonna be one of those guys in the
band wearing their own shirt. That's embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I would wear a Casey on the K shirt.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Oh, I absolutely would. That's different though, that that represents
the good mister Pegram, not our own.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Do we talk about this on air? I pitched Casey
on getting a T shirt with just his face on it.
You were against that, right?
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah? Yeah? I think so. I'm going to say a
note to that one. Oh man, Casey on the sad
sad case Well, you know what, Hey, how about this, listeners, Yeah,
you guys speak up, let us know, demand it, Demand
Casey's face on a T shirt. Then we'll see if
he changes his tune. Oh, we're gonna be in deep
trouble on that one. Huh so oh yeah. So they
(20:04):
strung up the line, Yeah, probably along a similar route
as there would have been a train travel I imagine.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
That would make sense, right, that's a good point. It
really gets national attention when the device is used by
the Whig Party to telegraph their presidential nomination from Baltimore, Maryland,
to Washington, d C. Much much faster than an ordinary
courier could have traveled and people say, holy smokes, building
(20:32):
this wires is real pain. Once you have the wire up,
this is very useful.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yeah, and it makes me think of those barbed wire
telephone networks because all you need is a conductive material.
There's something special about it just has to travel from
point A to point B and it can transmit those messages.
And it's so cool because I mean, it makes sense,
but I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms.
You know, in my head, the invention of the telegraph
was so far removed from the inventor of the telephone.
(20:59):
But that's how how technology works when you're building on
the work of others. Antonio Meucci, who was an Italian immigrant,
started developing what was referred to as the talking telegraph
as early as eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
We see the concurrence or the confluence rather of these
similar technologies.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Oh, speaking of your parallel thinking, the Italian gentleman I
just mentioned came up with his design completely independently of
Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with the invention. So
it just goes to show like it's totally a thing
that happens.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
It's first to the patent office. Sometimes that's the way
it works. Right. So Morris has finally achieved his mission,
and almost twenty years later, nineteen twenty years later, he
has not put his tragedy to rest, but he has
made something positive in the world from this terrible personal catastrophe.
(21:56):
And that brings us to the question that we have
to ask, would Morse code or would the telegraph have
existed without this man on personal mission? The answer is yes,
it just wouldn't be Morse code. We've been throwing around
the phrase Morse code and we said they're dots and dashes.
(22:19):
What exactly is Morse code? It changed a little over time, right.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
It did change a little bit over time, because, like
we said, you know, he had this invention that he
had worked with these other inventors to achieve, including Alfred Vail,
who invented his contribution to the device, which was the
telegraph key, which is literally that little button that we've
been talking about that allows you to like enter in
the code. But Morse himself was credited with coming up
(22:46):
with a system of dots, as in a short beep
and then a long beep beep versus beep, and with
those it's sort of like a Braille alphabet, but for
your ears instead of your fingers right.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Right, And he created this code with some inspiration from
earlier attempts to communicate even just line of sight over
distance through visual cues, you know, semaphore kind of stuff.
Yet a controversy exists. If you look at International Morse
Code now we still call it Morse code, you'll see
that that fairly easy to grock system dots and dashes.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Or ditson does as it's referred to in the parlance
of Morse coderie.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yes, and I like the phrase coderie. However, many scholars
will tell you that Morse code is misnamed and it
should actually be called Veil code due to the contributions
of Alfred Vail, who collaborated with Samuel Morse. So many
scholars will say that Veil, as a collaborator, was the
(23:49):
generative force behind what we call Morse code. However, people
who say that Morse invented it himself will point out
that Veil in public and private claimed he invented the code,
and he credited Samuel Morse with the creation of the
code in different private correspondence. So if you want to
(24:10):
be a revolutionary academic, you can you can argue the
veil side of it. It's just many people attribute Morse
code to Samuel Morse, including Alfred Vail.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, and I actually had the misconception that Morse code
was sort of the way you would enter in letters
alpha numerically, like in a telephone where you know each
however many you know A is one dot, B is two,
C is three. But if you think about it in
a whole sentence, if you keep things in one letter
at a time like that, it would take ages to
(24:43):
communicate any meaningful information. Right, So there's a whole other
system that makes Morse code efficient and able to have
high words per minutent counts, which is how Morse code
transmissions are measured. But I have to say, Ben, even
after reading into this stuff, maybe I'm being a little
dense here, I still don't fully get like how the
(25:03):
code works. Because if an S is an sos is
three dits, an O is three dos and S is
three dits, how does that relate to other letters? Or
is it a phrase based like maybe you can acca.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
So think of it in terms of units, So a
dit or dot think of it as one unit, almost
like music, Okay, and a dash is three units, so
dot and then a dash is got it for lack
of a better vocal cue, The space between parts of
(25:37):
the same letter would be one unit, so there's one
dits space between these dits and these dos. And the
space between separate letters is three units, so there's a
three unit space between every letter that you send out.
So when an sos, you would have that dit and
(25:58):
then a space for the span of three other dits.
So people would say, Okay, that's stopped, that's an S
and then where is that why? On telegrams they say
stop now, I'm sorry, keep going. But the the the
space between words would be seven units, so they're they're
(26:19):
counting not just the dits or the das, but they're
counting the absence of those, and they they can figure
out from the spaces between letters or words what a
phrase is supposed to be.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
I see. And also if I'm looking at this chart
of the alphabet and the number system one through ten
or one through nine and zero, it's a little easy
than you might think. A is dit do B is
dot dit dit dit C is da di da dit
I like saying do dit it's fine, d is da
dit dit E is just one dit f is dit
dit do dit?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
And going back to your question, why is it not
a dit for one? Dit dit for two? Did dit
for three? I feel like a beats about to drop,
but one is actually did da da da seems long
for one?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
It does. And what we're talking about right now, this
code that we're reading back to you is what became
known as International Morris Code and it was adopted by
the international community because incorporated the Latin alphabet with some
extra Latin letters and also Arabic numerals and some punctuation
and some other symbols that were not accounted for in
(27:29):
Morris's original code. So over time Morse's basis for Morse
Code got phased out and it actually ended up not
even being the original Morse code that Morris created that
kind of took hold and got adopted by the international community.
It was this International Morse Code that was developed by
Frederick Clemens Girk, who was a German writer and journalist
(27:51):
and also someone that was very interested in telegraphy, and
he revised that Morse Code to make it make more sense,
include more necessary care that could be adopted more widely.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah, So ten years after that first telegraph line opens
in eighteen forty four, there were over twenty three thousand
miles of line or wire crossing the continent and it
hit a watershed moment as various businesses that required quick,
long distance communication began to use telegraph systems. Railroad companies
(28:25):
were one of the first to the plate there they
would use it to communicate between their stations, and these
telegraph companies began to pop up everywhere that you could imagine.
While this was happening, countries in Europe were developing their
own system of Morse code. And the code used in
America was called American Morse Code or Railroad Morse, and
(28:47):
the code used in Europe was called Continental Morse. And
so that's when that's when they realized they need to
standardize this stuff, as you pointed out, with something that
everyone can agree on. And one of the things that
brought this need for an international code to public attention
was the use of radio communication, invented in the eighteen nineties, right,
(29:11):
and radio frequencies got longer and longer and longer, it
became possible to communicate internationally. And that's when they realized, Okay,
if we're talking about a global level of communication. We
all have to more or less be speaking the same language.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
That's right, and as technology tends to do, it was
subsumed by the next best thing, which became the telephone
or the talking telegraph, and then radio communication or wireless right,
because you didn't have to have the infrastructure. It was
all just done on radio waves. Yeah. That was adopted
by the military for communicating between you know, planes and such.
(29:49):
And even though like for example, amateur radio enthusiasts still
use Morse code, it's a little bit more of kind
of a quirky holdover from the past. I believe, Ben,
you were telling me that pilots and the military personnel
had to learn Morse code up until I think the nineties, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Up until the nineteen nineties, pilots were required to know
how to communicate using Morse code, and up until two
thousand and seven, if you wanted to get an amateur
radio license, you had to pass a Morse code proficiency test.
But you're right, the average person today is probably not
going to communicate in Morse code, and they're probably not
(30:32):
going to know it. Most of us wouldn't know Morse code.
I mean, I admitted at the beginning of the show
that I promptly forgot it after getting whatever merit badge
I was gunning for. And believe it or not, man
American morse code, the railroad morse code is still around.
It's nearly extinct, but it's still around. And one group
(30:56):
of people who are keeping it alive might surprise you, sure,
amateur radio operators. I feel like that that's an easy one.
Civil war reenactors say, what civil war reenactors keep American
morse code alive?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Interesting? And one that I hadn't thought about is or
something we haven't even discussed at all, is that you
can also transmit morse code visually through flashes of light
and at sea to communicate between ships or for a
ship to communicate with shore. They have these lamps that
have shutters on them. They can flash codes to, you know,
to the shore, so you can actually get messages back
(31:31):
to shore by line of sight.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
And military personnel POW's have used Morse code through blinking
to communicate the true nature of their situation in.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Propaganda videos, so it's got all kinds of uses. Still.
Not to mention young lads banging on tree stumps in
the forest, Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yes, it's a huge industry nowadays, and that's our story.
There is a point though, that we should make, and
that is that the telegraph system or something like it
would have developed without Samuel Morse because so many people
were working on something similar. However, his personal mission, his
(32:13):
passion to save other people from the situation that he
himself encountered, played a huge role in the timing of
Morse code for it to become a thing when it did.
It may have taken a little bit longer had one
man not been so emotionally and personally driven to pursue
this innovation. And you know what I say, thanks, because
(32:37):
we couldn't have had a podcast if things like Morse
code and telegraphs and later radio never existed.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I mean, certainly like one of the earliest forms of
long distance communication that served as the basis for It's
just like the spark of an idea. So hey, what
if I could communicate an idea or a thought or
a message from point A to point B. That's literally
what podcasting and broadcasting a media of any kind is.
It's all a jumping off from that simple idea.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
One day we should tell the story of Farnsworth, the
inventor of television. You know he got that idea when
he was a fourteen year old farmhand. Hmm, well, story
for another day. I like it, and we've got to say,
maybe we should go back re record this entire episode
in worse code.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
What do you think? Yeah, I don't know about that.
I'll think it over.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Let us know your thoughts on worse code. Feel free
to write to us in morse code if you wish.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on I almost said Amazon. I don't know if you
can find us in Amazon, but we're definitely on Twitter,
and you can find us collectively and individually on Instagram.
I am at Ben Bullen.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I am at Embryonic Insider. You can check out our
community page on Facebook, The Ridiculous Historians, where you can
drop your history memes and hang out with your fellow
podcast fans enthusiasts and check us out next time when
we explore the weird story of how a stray dog
caused a war, It's true in the meantime thanks to
our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Casey, I want to make eye contact with you and
apologize for bringing up the Casey face t shirt again.
But now the more I say the phrase, the more
I'm feeling it. So I don't know if this puts
us on opposite sides of history, but I hope we
remain friends.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
We'll see you ends up on the right side of history.
Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme and is
always on the right side of history and the right
side of our hearts, along with Gabe, our research associate,
and you Ben.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
And to you as well, Noel, and you know what
to you, Samuel Moose.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
Here you go. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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