Speaking in CODE
H ave you ever made up your own secret language? Would you like to know a way to talk without everyone else knowing what you’re talking about? In the mid-19th century, a man named Samuel Morse invented a code that would allow people to do just that, and a machine to help them do it. Samuel Morse
Nowadays with text messages and tools like Skype and FaceTime, you can talk to friends all over the world almost anytime you want. But less than 200 years ago, people didn’t have a great way of talking to people who were far from them. Until Samuel Morse.
Born in Massachusetts, he was a painter and sculptor. But on the way home from a trip to Europe in 1832, he met a man who would change his life — an inventor named Charles Thomas Jackson. The two got talking about how an electronic impulse could be carried on a wire for a long distance, and Morse thought he could figure out how to do it. Just four years later, he and a few others had invented the telegraph machine.
How it worked
To make the telegraph work, the machine has to complete an electrical circuit, which is a path of wire connecting the point of the switch and the point of the thing that is turning on. The telegraph had a button that, when pushed, completed the circuit and made the machine on the other side receive the information.
Morse code, the language of the telegraph, is a series of what are called dots and dashes — long clicks and short clicks — that the messenger would send and the receiver would interpret. But Morse code worked in other ways, too. Ships at sea would — and still do — use flashlights, with long and short blinks, to signal to other ships.
Today
With the invention of the telephone and other ways of communicating, Morse code isn’t that popular anymore. One group that sometimes uses it is amateur radio operators (called hams). There’s no age requirement, so anyone can take up ham radio as a hobby.