Who Invented Morse Code? The History of Morse Code

Two dates are disputed, and this page gives each version rather than picking one. For Speedwell, Wikipedia's articles give 6 January 1838 for the first successful test, with the message "A patient waiter is no loser", and 11 January for the first public demonstration. The National Park Service's 1974 nomination of the site gives no day at all: it says only that "by the middle of January the work was complete" and that a public demonstration followed. The second dispute, about the room the 1844 message left from, is set out under the first message below.

Morse code is named after Samuel F. B. Morse, the son of the preacher and geographer Jedidiah Morse. He studied at Yale College and trained as a painter in London. His first major painting, the House of Representatives in session (1822), was a commercial failure, but a commission in 1824 to paint the Marquis de Lafayette lifted him among New York's leading artists. In 1832 he was appointed professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York, now New York University.

He was also active in politics on anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic tickets, and ran for mayor of New York in 1836 and 1841. His painting career ended in 1837, when he failed to win a commission for one of four large paintings for the Capitol Rotunda. That same year he gave his attention to the telegraph.

Success came slowly. Morse spent some 20 years in legal fights over the rights to his invention, and an 1854 US Supreme Court decision established his patent rights. In 1857 and 1858 he served as electrician to Cyrus W. Field's company laying the transatlantic cable, and in 1858 several European countries together paid him 400,000 francs for their use of his system. He died in New York on 2 April 1872, aged 80.

Alfred Vail was born in Morristown on 25 September 1807. His father owned the Speedwell Iron Works, where Alfred worked as a machinist before studying at the University of the City of New York. In 1837 he saw Morse demonstrate the telegraph there (on 2 September, according to Wikipedia) and convinced Morse to take him on as a partner: Vail would build the machines and pay for the American and foreign patents in return for a share of Morse's rights.

What Vail built is not in doubt. He replaced the pencil in Morse's receiver with a steel-pointed pen that pressed the code into a paper tape, and he improved the register that recorded it. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds a key Vail made in 1844, believed to be from the first Baltimore to Washington line, as an improvement on Morse's original transmitter.

Who designed the alphabet is disputed. The Smithsonian Institution Archives credits Vail, who "developed a simpler alphabetic system of code to replace Morse's original, but more complicated numerical code." Morse's supporters point to Vail's own words. According to Wikipedia, Vail wrote to his father in February 1838 that "Professor Morse has invented a new plan of an alphabet, and has thrown aside the Dictionaries," and his 1845 book on the telegraph also gives Morse the code. Wikipedia also notes that several scholars make the case for Vail. The patents carried Morse's name, and when Morse took on a congressman as a partner, the Vail brothers' share was cut to one-eighth.

Joseph Henry, later the first Secretary of the Smithsonian, had a grievance of his own: he had invented the high-intensity magnet Morse's telegraph used, and Vail's 1845 book did not credit him.

For most of history, a message travelled no faster than a courier on horseback. France built a network of visual semaphore stations at the end of the 18th century, and when the US Treasury asked for telegraph proposals in 1837, every reply but one described an optical system of signal towers. Morse's was the exception: an "electromagnetic telegraph" that sent signals by wire. He told Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury that his device had already sent a signal through 10 miles of spooled wire.

The telegraph could only switch a current on and off, so every message had to become a pattern of short and long pulses and pauses. Morse's first plan used numbers. His 1840 patent describes numerals made of dots and spaces, and a "dictionary or vocabulary" in which words are "alphabetically arranged and regularly numbered" so that "each word in the language has its telegraphic number." The operator looked up each word and sent its number. The same patent also lists "signs of letters" built from the same dots, lines and spaces.

The letter code that replaced the dictionary gave the shortest signals to the most common letters, which is why E is a single dot and T a single dash. According to Wikipedia, Vail judged which letters were most common by counting the type in the type cases of a Morristown newspaper.

The system had three parts: a key, a line wire and a register. Pressing the key closed the circuit, and current ran down the wire. At the far end it energised an electromagnet, which pulled a lever carrying a steel point against a narrow strip of paper moved along by clockwork. A short press embossed a short mark, the dot, and a longer press a dash. Frank Pope's 1881 handbook for operators still describes it this way.

Distance was the hard part. Gale's relay, built on Henry's work, boosted the signal so it could travel farther. The line to Baltimore was first meant to run underground in a pipe laid by Ezra Cornell, but the insulation failed, and the wire was strung overhead on poles instead.

In time, operators learned to read the code by ear. By 1881, Pope writes, many of the larger offices had dropped the paper register for a "sounder", which clicked heavily as each dot or dash began and more lightly as it ended. A dot made as much noise as a dash; only the time between the two clicks told them apart.

The strip above draws the 1844 message to this site's American Morse timing, like the marks on a paper tape. Look for the narrow gaps inside the O of GOD and the O and R of WROUGHT.

By 24 May 1844 the wire ran 38 miles from the Capitol to the railroad depot in Baltimore, along the route of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In front of a small group of guests, Morse invited Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the patent commissioner Henry L. Ellsworth, to choose the first message. She picked a line from the Bible, Numbers 23:23: "What hath God wrought." Vail, in Baltimore, sent the same words straight back. The message was recorded on paper tape, and according to Wikipedia the original tape is kept at the Library of Congress.

Where Morse sat that day is disputed. The Library of Congress chronology of his papers says he sent it "from the Supreme Court chamber in the United States Capitol," and a plaque placed outside the Old Supreme Court Chamber in 1944 says the same. The Senate Historical Office disagrees. Morse had set up his equipment in April 1844 in a room on the north end of the Senate wing, and researchers have found no record that he moved, which makes that room "the most likely location from which the famous message was sent."

It was not the first message over a Morse telegraph. In January 1838 the crowd at Speedwell watched "railroad cars just arrived 345 passengers" go through, as The Jerseyman reported on 17 January. On 1 May 1844, with the line still unfinished, Vail sent news of Henry Clay's nomination at the Whig convention from Annapolis to Morse at the Capitol, a full hour before the train carrying the same news arrived.

At 20 words per minute, the message lasts 10.44 seconds in the American Morse it was sent in (174 units) and 11.34 seconds in today's International Morse (189 units). The difference is in the two Os and the R, which are shorter in American Morse. The What hath God wrought in Morse code page has the International version with its own player.

Type your own message into the Morse code translator and press Play. Then open the Code table menu and choose American (Railroad) to hear it the way Vail's line sent it, or open the 1844 message in American Morse ready to play.

The code Morse and Vail used had quirks. C, O, R, Y and Z had a short space inside them, L was a long dash, and the zero a longer one. In 1848 Friedrich Gerke, inspector of the telegraph company on the Hamburg to Cuxhaven line, revised it. According to Wikipedia, he removed the inner spaces and the two long dashes and changed the codes for eleven letters and most numerals, so that every letter was built from dots and dashes alone. The Austro-German Telegraph Union adopted his code in 1851.

The inner spaces were a real weakness, because a space inside a letter is easy to take for the gap between two letters. Run the American 1844 message through the International table, reading each inner space as a letter break, and WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT comes out as WHAT HATH GEED WEIEEUGHT. Hear C, another spaced letter, and the two letters of the message that changed, O and R:

• C, International

  -.-.11 units · 0.66 s

• C, American

  ...6 units · 0.36 s

• O, International

  ---11 units · 0.66 s

• O, American

  ..4 units · 0.24 s

• R, International

  .-.7 units · 0.42 s

• R, American

  ...6 units · 0.36 s

In Paris, delegates of twenty countries met from 1 March 1865 and on 17 May signed the International Telegraph Convention, the founding act of today's ITU. Its regulations required "the adoption of Morse code and its instruments." Europe's version was first called Continental Morse and later International Morse, and the original code, still in use on US lines, became known as American Morse. Every letter and digit that differs is on the American Morse code page, and today's chart is the Morse code alphabet.

A transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, and two decades after the Capitol demonstration about 100,000 miles of telegraph wire crossed the United States. When radio arrived in the late 1890s it carried Morse too, with each operator at first using the version they knew. The 1912 Radiotelegraph Convention in London settled the question: "The signals to be employed are those of Morse International Code."

Ships relied on Morse for distress and safety calls from the start of radio. The International Maritime Organization's Global Maritime Distress and Safety System took full effect on 1 February 1999, and, in the IMO's words, "on that date, the Morse Code was phased out." In the United States, the last commercial Morse transmission went out on 12 July 1999 and signed off with Morse's own "What hath God wrought."

The code outlived that ending. US radio amateurs who send Morse today use International Morse almost exclusively, according to Wikipedia, and Is Morse code still used? covers who else relies on it. Morse's birthday, 27 April, is kept as Morse Code Day, and the distress signal everyone knows is on SOS in Morse code. To hear any message the way either code sends it, paste it into the translator and switch the code table between International and American (Railroad).