THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, April 13, 1995               TAG: 9504130001
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   32 lines

THERE HAVE BEEN TWO MORSE CODES MORSE EDITORIAL DECODED

Col. Damon Coble, 86, of Norfolk worked 35 years with Western Union Telegraph Co. and has known the Morse code for 70 years. He was kind enough recently to explain why some of the letter codes cited in a recent editorial on the Coast Guard's signing off on the Morse code failed to match the current Morse code. Many readers noted the disparity. Regrettably, we did not.

It turns out that the code that Morse invented, and which he and the inventor Thomas Edison employed, is different for some letters from the one used today. Morse and Edison used what was called the American Morse code. SOS in that code, for example, is different from SOS in the current one, which is called the International Morse code, or often simply the Morse code.

When Edison proposed marriage by squeezing his intended's hand, he and she used the American Morse code, now outdated.

Coble knows both codes. He said the American Morse code ``y'' cited in the editorial was wrong. It should have been dot-dot-(space)-dot-dot.

It was the spaces in the letters that led to a rewriting of the code, Coble said. It was spaces in our knowledge that led to all the confusion. We thank Coble and, as always, wish we'd known more. by CNB