Will the real inventor of Morse code please stand?

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Morse code is a way for people to send information across long distances. The code we use today, made from dit and dah elements is nothing like the code demonstrated and attributed to Samuel Morse in 1837.

Over years and with assistance from Professor of Chemistry Leonard Gail and Physicist Joseph Henry, then Professor of Literature, Samuel Morse, and mechanically minded Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system that automatically moved a paper tape and used an electromagnet to pull a stylus into the paper and a spring to retract it, marking the paper with lines. The original system was only intended to transmit numbers, and combined with a dictionary, the operator could decode the message. The telegraph was able to send zig-zag and straight lines, transmitting the message "Successful experiment with telegraph September 4 1837". The system was enhanced to include letters, making it much more versatile. On the 6th of January 1838, across 4.8 km of wire, strung across a barn, the new design with letters and numbers was demonstrated.

To optimise the enhanced version of the code, Alfred Vail went to his local newspaper in Morristown, New Jersey, to count the movable type he found in the compositor's type-cases, and assigned shorter sequences to the most common letters. You might think that this explains the distribution of the codes we see today, but you'd be wrong.

The 1838 system used four different element lengths and varied the spacing inside a character. For example, the letter "o" was signified by two dits with a two unit space between them, where today it's represented by three dahs. The letter "p" was signified by five dits, today this represents the number "5", and the code didn't distinguish between "i" and "y", between "g" and "j", and between "s" and "z".

A decade later and an ocean away in Germany, writer, journalist, and musician Friedrich Gerke created the Hamburg alphabet, based on the work by Vail and Morse, it standardised the length of the elements and spacing into what we use today, the dit and the dah. He changed about half of the characters and also incorporated four special German characters, the umlaut version of A, O and U and the CH sound - pronounced like the sound for the composer "Bach" or the Dutch name "Benschop" - not to be confused with the CH in child, or the CK in clock, or the SH sound in shop. It was different in other ways. For example, the letter "i" and "j" had the same code. The code was optimised to be more robust across undersea telegraph cables. I'll be coming back to that before we're done exploring, but not today. If you want to skip ahead, the term you're looking for is dispersion. Gerke's code was adopted in 1851 across Germany and Austria and it is known as Continental Morse code.

By the time most of Gerke's code was adopted as the European Standard in 1865 as one of many agreements that mark the founding of the International Telegraph Union in Paris, only four sequences of the original 1838 code remained and only two of those, "e" and "h" were identical. Which means that although the idea that Morse code is based around English is often repeated, at this stage it's nothing more than a myth, which my previous word list and subsequent dictionary letter counts across over fifty languages confirm.

I'll mention that given Gerke's German heritage, I also made a letter count from a modern German dictionary and one from 1901 and found that the letter distribution in those two are very similar with only the letter "s" and "t" swapped between position four and five in the popularity contest stakes. The German letter Top-5 is "enrts" and the "o" is the 16th most popular letter.

Speaking of "o", one observation to make is that the new International Morse code contained the letter "o" as dah-dah-dah, it also contained the letter "p" as dit-dah-dah-dit. These two codes come from an 1849 telegraph code designed by physicist, inventor, engineer and astronomer Carl August von Steinheil. There is evidence suggesting that he invented a print telegraph and matching dot script in 1836, based around positive and negative pulses, rather than pulse duration. I'm purposely skipping over earlier telegraph systems built and used by Carl Friedrich Gauss, Wilhelm Edward Weber, and Steinheil, only because we're talking about Morse code, not the telegraph.

The 1865 ITU standard for International Morse code includes several accented letters, symbols for semi-colon, exclamation mark, chevrons and several control codes and both normal and short forms for numbers which merge all the dahs in any digit into a single dah. Many of these codes are not part of the official standard today.

I'll point out that over time, experienced telegraph operators learnt to decode dits and dahs based on sound alone, negating the need for paper. This translates directly into how we experience Morse in our hobby today, by tone only.

There is a much more detailed explanation on how the telegraph evolved in a book by Russel W. Burns called: "Communications: An International History of the Formative Years". Fair warning, there are many claims and counterclaims, including the possibility that someone else entirely, Harrison Gray Dyar, a Chemist, invented an electrochemical telegraph, using chemically treated paper to make marks, dits and dahs, and demonstrated it between 1826 and 1828 near a race track on Long Island.

I'm mentioning this because Samuel Morse is often attributed as the source of all things telegraphy, but the reality appears to be much more nuanced and, unsurprisingly, there are conflicting accounts depending on the source, including acceptance and repudiation that Alfred Vail was the inventor of what we now call Morse code.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB