THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504070004
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
In one of the more remarkable midlife career changes in history, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, born in Massachusetts in 1791, switched from successful portrait painter to inventor, while in his mid-40s.
Although unschooled in electricity, he pioneered the electric telegraph and in 1838 invented a language of dots and dashes that millions of Americans have learned, and most have forgotten: the Morse code.
His code was in the news last Friday, as the Coast Guard ceremoniously signed off on its use, more than a century and a half after Morse visited a typesetting shop to see which letters were most and least common. The most common, the ``e,'' he assigned a single dot. The seldom-used ``q'' he designated dot-dot-dash-dot.
In its first few decades, the telegraph, employing the Morse code, annihilated distance, as messages that had taken months to deliver now took minutes, if not seconds. The high-strung wires crisscrossing America sang with the words of a nation suddenly communicating with all of itself. Between ships at sea, lights flashed the code: short for a dot, long for a dash.
The first two children of the great inventor Thomas Edison were nicknamed ``dot'' and ``dash.'' He proposed to his second wife by squeezing a Morse code message on her hand. She squeezed back two shorts, one short, then three shorts, meaning yes.
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts were taught Morse code for most of this century. The Navy employed the Morse code into the 1970s. Just three years ago, the Federal Communications Commission stopped requiring knowledge of Morse Code for beginning ham-radio operators licenses. Till then, learning Morse code was a kind of rite of passage for ham-radio operators. In 1991, more than a half-million ham-radio operators knew Morse code.
The 1913 Girl Scouts handbook extolled the code's versatility, noting that the dots and dashes could be sent by hand or hat, or by ``coughing, stamping and scratching with the foot or a bit of stick.''
During World War II, Barbara and William Mettler, then unofficially engaged, exchanged love letters written in dots and dashes. He was a pilot out of New Guinea; she, a Red Cross worker in New Zealand. Barbara, 76, now a retired Girl Scouts official living with her husband, William, in Virginia Beach, said, ``We just wanted to have a secret message that supposedly no one else could read.'' Of course someone who knew Morse code could have read them, she said, but still they felt more personal in Morse code.
Coast Guard Chief Lee Halyard, 35, said Friday that using the Morse code always made him feel special. He learned it when he was 18 and could easily transmit 24 words a minute.
Halyard serves at CAMSLANT, a communications station in southern Chesapeake. By the turn of the century, CAMSLANT will be the Coast Guard's only manned communications station for the whole eastern seaboard, thanks to modern technology.
But the Morse code will not be soon forgotten. Even today, if a phone connection is too weak or too static-filled to make out words, two people can communicate by making high-pitched dots and dashes, provided they know the Morse code. by CNB