American Morse Code (Railroad Morse)

Units count the letter itself, its dots, dashes and inner spaces, without the gap after it. The last column is the trap: American F, J, P, Q and X are real International codes for other characters, so a message in the wrong table decodes into wrong letters rather than errors. On an old chart, an O drawn as two dots with a gap, or an L drawn as one long bar, means the chart is American Morse.

Hear the five spaced letters and the long-dash L as this site plays them:

• C, American

  ...6 units · 0.36 s

• O, American

  ..4 units · 0.24 s

• R, American

  ...6 units · 0.36 s

• Y, American

  ....8 units · 0.48 s

• Z, American

  ....8 units · 0.48 s

• L, American

  4 units · 0.24 s

The Morse code alphabet chart has the same International and American comparison beside today's full alphabet.

Only the 4 is the same in both codes. Several American digits are International letters, so a number misread in the wrong table turns into text.

• 0, American

  6 units · 0.36 s

Frank Pope's 1881 manual for telegraph operators uses one long dash for both L and 0: on its own or among letters it is read as L, and among figures as 0. To avoid errors, numbers were "always sent twice over," once written out in words and once in figures. The International digits, with sound, are on Morse code numbers.

Every punctuation mark in the site's American table differs from International:

Charts disagree on the hyphen: Morse Code World gives it as ... .-... Pope notes that the semicolon, the parenthesis and the italics sign were "seldom used in this country."

American Morse has more than two signals. Pope's manual names three, the dot, the short dash and the long dash, and four kinds of space: inside a letter, inside a "spaced letter", between letters and between words. He warns that beginners wrongly think the alphabet "consists solely of dots and dashes." Here are his rules beside a modern reference and this site's player, all counted in dot lengths:

This site's player follows Pope for the dot, the short dash, the zero and the spaces inside and between letters. It differs from him in two places: it plays L as a 4-unit dash where Pope's long dash is 6, and it leaves 7 units between words, as International Morse does, where Pope leaves 6. Morse Code World uses shorter values throughout and calls its timing "just one interpretation," noting "quite some variation in the timing." Pope himself says the dot had no fixed length: it "should increase with the length of the circuit." Wikipedia notes that novices' timing errors with these lengths had a name of their own: hog-Morse.

Pope's test for a spaced letter is that its space "should be just double" the ordinary space inside a letter, "just sufficient to distinguish these characters from I, S and H." Listen for it: I has a 1-unit space, the American O a 2-unit space, and two separate Es a 3-unit gap. Then compare T with the two long dashes.

• I

  ..3 units · 0.18 s

• O, American

  ..4 units · 0.24 s

• E E, two letters

  . .5 units · 0.30 s

• T

  -3 units · 0.18 s

• L, American

  4 units · 0.24 s

• 0, American

  6 units · 0.36 s

Measured with this site's timing engine at 20 WPM, where one unit is 60 milliseconds. HELLO shrinks the most because its two Ls become single long dashes and its O becomes two dots. SOS in American Morse has no dashes at all: S, an O of two dots with a space, and S again. The SOS in Morse code page plays the International signal, and What hath God wrought in Morse code the 1844 message.

Wikipedia, citing the telegraph historian Lewis Coe, says the same operator could send at least 20% faster in American Morse. The 8% to 35% above is this site's own measurement with its own timing, not a historical figure.

The cost of the speed was ambiguity. Take the American version of the 1844 message, treat every inner space as a break between letters, and decode it with the International table: the result is WHAT HATH GEED WEIEEUGHT.

American Morse carried the first official message on the Baltimore to Washington line on 24 May 1844, and it became the code of the US telegraph companies that followed. Pope's 1881 manual titles its chapter on the apparatus "The Morse, or American Telegraphic System."

When Europe moved to Gerke's code, the US companies stayed put. According to Wikipedia, an attempt in 1854 to make International Morse the US standard was rejected by the telegraph companies: their overhead wires suffered far less than undersea cables from the signal smearing that troubled long lines, and they had no wish to retrain staff. Operators handling transatlantic cable traffic had to know both codes and recode incoming messages into American Morse.

Radio, from the late 1890s, began with the same split: American operators used American Morse and European operators Continental. The 1912 Radiotelegraph Convention in London required "Morse International Code" for radio, but American Morse stayed the standard of US landline telegraph companies, including Western Union. It was also used for domestic radio on the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and many US ship operators learned to send both. The amateur bands once carried a mix, since many retired landline operators preferred the old code; today US amateurs use International Morse almost exclusively.

American Morse now lives on mainly in American railroad museums and Civil War re-enactments, according to Wikipedia, and with the Morse Telegraph Club, an international non-profit that keeps telegraph traditions alive. Its members use "Morse Code (American or International) either wire or wireless."

Gerke's 1848 code dropped the spaced letters and both long dashes, and gave new codes to eleven letters and most numerals. That suited undersea cables, which smear signals together more the longer they are. American Morse, with its closely spaced dots, suffered more from this, and the first transatlantic cable of 1858 could carry less than one word per minute.

The Austro-German Telegraph Union adopted Gerke's code for its cables in 1851, because its members had agreed to connect cables directly across borders. In 1865 the International Telegraph Conference in Paris required "the adoption of Morse code and its instruments," and radio followed in 1912. The history of Morse code tells the whole story. For the other forms of the code, including Japanese Morse code, start at What is Morse code?

Open the Morse code translator and choose American (Railroad) in the Code table menu. Type a message and the translator writes it in American Morse and plays it as sound, light or vibration, with the spaced letters and long dashes timed as in the table above. This link opens it ready with the 1844 message in American Morse.

To decode American Morse, type the space inside a spaced letter as x, the long L dash as L and the zero dash as an underscore. So ..x. is C, while .. . with a real space decodes as two letters, I and E.