CLASSIC: The Tragic Origin Story of Morse Code

Summary

Ridiculous History — "CLASSIC: The Tragic Origin Story of Morse Code" (February 7, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this engaging "classic" episode, hosts Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown explore the surprisingly tragic personal history behind Morse code and the development of the telegraph, focusing on the inventor Samuel Morse. The pair take listeners through Morse's early life, his career as a painter, the heartbreaking event that inspired his communication breakthrough, and the collaborative, sometimes contentious process that gave rise to one of history’s most influential communication systems.

The episode’s tone balances the show’s signature lighthearted banter with moments of genuine emotion and historical insight, making the human context behind technological developments as fascinating as the inventions themselves.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Connections to Morse Code

• Both Ben and Noel briefly reminisce about (not) learning Morse code in Scouts, using this as a segue into the topic.
  • “When you turn 11, you get your first big boy bike and you learn Morse code.” — Ben [03:09]
• They highlight how foundational Morse code and the telegraph were to revolutionary advances in global communication.

2. Samuel Morse’s Unexpected Beginnings

• Background: Samuel Morse, born 1791, is now known for his eponymous code, but began life as a painter.
  • “Upon graduating from Yale, he became a quite well-regarded portrait painter... His work is pretty breathtaking.” — Noel [06:26-07:13]
• Morse’s early masterpiece, Dying Hercules, is discussed, including his technique of sculpting before painting.

3. The Tragedy That Sparked Innovation

• While Morse was away painting a commission of the Marquis de Lafayette, his wife Lucretia became fatally ill and died at 25. Due to the delay in receiving the news by post, he learned about her death only after she was already buried.
  • “He wrote to his wife two days after she had died, unaware that she had passed…” — Ben [08:37]
  • Quote (from Morse’s letter to his daughter):
    “You cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has been kept open.” — Ben quoting Morse [11:02]
• This personal disaster drove Morse’s mission to create a system for faster, reliable long-distance communication.
  • “When he learned of her death, he vowed to find some way to deliver important messages in a timely manner.” — Ben [11:19]

4. Early Collaborations & Technical Development

• Inspired on a sea voyage by Charles Thomas Jackson’s electromagnet, Morse conceived the idea for sending coded messages via electric signals.
  • “What if I could send a message along a wire by opening and closing an electrical circuit?” — Ben paraphrasing Morse [12:13-12:34]
• Joseph Henry, a key figure in electromagnetism, influenced Morse's technical understanding and design (although a lawsuit would follow over credit).
  • “...the experimental electromagnets that he has built… He's well, you don't wanna call it plagiarism, but he's riffing.” — Ben [14:29]
• Morse's first prototype used an artist’s canvas stretcher as a telegraph receiver—a poetic symbol of his shift from art to science.
  • “He took an artist canvas stretcher and made it into a telegraph receiver…” — Ben [16:20]

5. Getting Morse’s System Off the Ground

• Morse, Leonard Gale, and especially Alfred Vail (who contributed the famous “key” transmitter) improved the system and code.
• Facing skepticism and infrastructure challenges (lack of long wires), they convinced the U.S. government to fund a demonstration with $30,000 (≈$1 million today).
  • “They gave Morse Co. $30,000 to build a 38 mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington D.C.” — Ben [19:57]
• The successful transmission of the Whig Party’s presidential nomination fundamentally changed how the nation viewed communication technology.

6. Morse Code: Attribution and Evolution

• The code’s development was collaborative; some historians argue “Vail code” would be a more accurate name, though Vail himself credited Morse.
  • “However, people who say that Morse invented it himself will point out that Vail, in public and private, never claimed he invented the code.” — Ben [25:24]
• “International Morse code” (not original to Morse) incorporated new symbols and characters for global standardization.

7. Understanding Morse Code

• Morse code is explained as a system based on units: dots (dits) and dashes (dahs), with variable spacing to indicate letters and words.
  • “A dit or a dot…that's one unit…a dash is three units…” — Ben [26:51]
• The system’s logic is compared to Braille, but for the ears.

8. Wider Historical Impact and Later Developments

• The telegraph system rapidly spread, enabling over 23,000 miles of wire within a decade and fundamentally reshaping business and railroads.
  • The U.S. used “American Morse” (“railroad Morse”), while Europe adopted “Continental Morse,” giving rise to efforts at international standardization.
• The episode connects Morse code’s legacy to podcasts and modern broadcasting:
  • “...the spark of an idea: ‘Hey, what if I could communicate an idea…from point A to point B?’ That’s literally what podcasting and broadcasting…is.” — Noel [34:20]

9. The Lasting Legacy & Modern Echoes

• Although replaced by telephone and radio, Morse code persisted in aviation and military circles well into the late 20th century, and is still treasured by amateur radio enthusiasts and even Civil War reenactors.
  • “Civil War reenactors keep American Morse code alive.” — Ben [32:45]
• Morse code’s flexibility: It can be transmitted via sound, light, and even blinks—for example, POWs have flashed Morse in propaganda videos.
  • “Military personnel, POWs have used Morse code through blinking…” — Ben [33:08]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Personal Loss & Innovation:
  “You cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has been kept open.” — Samuel Morse (via Ben) [11:02]

• On the Significance of the First Message:
  “That first telegraph message that Morse sent…a little heavy, isn't it? ‘What hath God wrought?’ That sounds sinister to me.” — Noel [05:40]

• On Tech Evolution:
  “It’s first to the patent office sometimes. That’s the way it works.” — Ben [23:09]

• On Morse Code’s Place in History:
  “We couldn’t have had a podcast if things like Morse code and telegraphs and later radio never existed.” — Ben [34:20]

• On the Code’s Practical Structure:
  “A dit or a dot…that’s one unit…a dash is three units…” — Ben [26:51]

• On Collaborative Invention:
  “Most inventions that we think of as the huge game changing innovations…are not gonna be made up by one person working in isolation.” — Ben [04:39]

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Key Timestamps

• [03:09] — Scout memories; the phrase “When you turn 11...”
• [06:26–07:13] — Samuel Morse’s career as a painter
• [08:37–09:59] — The tragedy of Morse’s wife and its aftermath
• [11:02] — Morse’s letter to his daughter (emotional pivot)
• [12:13–12:59] — The ‘aha’ moment: electromagnets and message transmission
• [14:29–14:41] — Morse’s “riffing” on Joseph Henry’s designs and ensuing lawsuit
• [16:20] — Prototype: using a canvas stretcher as the first telegraph receiver
• [19:57–20:44] — U.S. government funding; calculating historic value ($30k ≈ $1M)
• [23:09] — The “first to the patent office” quip
• [25:24–25:56] — The debate over who truly invented “Morse code”
• [26:51–28:43] — How Morse code works, “dits and dahs” explained
• [32:45] — Civil War reenactors preserving American Morse code
• [33:08] — Code’s use in visual and POW contexts
• [34:20] — Morse code’s influence on the evolution of broadcast communication

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Final Thoughts

The episode skillfully paints Morse code as not just a technical achievement but also a deeply human story, born of grief and perseverance. Samuel Morse’s personal tragedy—his inability to receive urgent news in time—became the driving force behind pioneering rapid long-distance communication. The hosts highlight Morse’s journey from painter to inventor, the collaborative (and sometimes contentious) nature of breakthroughs, and Morse code’s long shadow over the worlds of military, amateur radio, and even pop culture.

Banter about Morse’s painterly past, joking asides about T-shirts, and genuine awe at the endurance of “dits and dahs” keep the tone buoyant. At the same time, the episode leaves listeners with a sense of how technological progress often springs not just from genius, but from heartbreak and the urgent desire to prevent future suffering.

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For listeners unfamiliar with either Morse code or the history behind it, this episode provides a thorough, entertaining, and unexpectedly moving introduction to a system that underpins much of our modern communication.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome back to this week's classic episode. Fellow ridiculous historians, this one, to be quite honest with you, is going to take some unexpected dark turns. Max, did you ever learn Morse code?

[B]

Oh, God, no. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I might have just said something very dirty. Or I might have said nothing. Probably the latter, but said something.

[A]

Yeah. Morse code is going to be familiar to a certain contingent of our fellow ridiculous historians. It is a useful thing to know, knowing it is maybe not as common now as it used to be back in the day. But the evolution of communication across the planet owes a lot to the telegraph and to Morse code. This revolutionized the way people transmit information. In today's classic episode, we are going to explore the life and times of the man who invented the code in the first place. A guy named Samuel Morse. Again, we cannot emphasize this enough. This is kind of a bummer.

[B]

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[A]

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[C]

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[A]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Noel, did you ever have to learn Morse code?

[D]

No.

[B]

God, that was not a very interesting response. Let me make something up. Yeah, totally. When I was in Cub Scouts, when we went on a camping trip into the wilderness, we had to learn how to communicate by tapping trees.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Tree bark. Yeah, exactly. Totally.

[A]

Well, when I was back in Boy Scouts, one of the things that our troop leaders continually needled me about, they're always like, ben, you're good at knots. You can find your way around in the woods, but you gotta learn Morse code, buddy. It's just. It's been too long, you know what I mean? You're 11 now. It's getting real. You gotta learn Morse code. And so eventually I learned Morse code, passed the test with it, and then promptly forgot it.

[B]

Yeah, when you turn 11, you get your first big boy bike and you learn Morse code.

[A]

Right, right. And that's for late bloomers, not for early adopters like our super Producer Casey Pegram. Give him a. Folks, today's episode is about Morse code, but more importantly, it's about the man himself.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

The Morseman.

[B]

The Morseman. Not to be confused with some sort of Norseman.

[A]

No, no. That's a hard m. Yes, yeah, yeah.

[B]

The man, the myth. The Morseman.

[A]

The Morseman. Samuel Morseman. Morse. So, Samuel Morse, born April 27, 1791. Today, he is remembered primarily for the code system that bears his name, Morse code. And everyone knows what that is. Casey, can we get just a little clip of how that would sound? There you go.

[B]

Perfect.

[A]

So like a series of short beeps and then long ones. Yeah.

[B]

And if you're really good at it, you can do it. I would do it more like dot, dot, dash, dot, dot, dash. But if you're really good and you work one of those little flipper paddle button things, you know, that you see in the old movies, you'd be more like beepity be. You know what I mean? Like, that's Morse code.

[A]

A telegraph.

[B]

Yeah, a telegraph which he's also credited with. He didn't really invent it exactly, but he improved upon a previous design and made it much more useful in relaying information more or less instantaneously.

[A]

Yeah, that's the thing. So most inventions that we think of as the huge game changing innovations, most of those are not gonna be made up by one person working in isolation. You know what I mean? Multiple people exhibit parallel thinking. It's a phrase you enjoy or, you.

[B]

Know, the whole idea of standing on the shoulders of giants and all that and improving piggybacking on something that has come before and making it better, making it suit the times.

[A]

Yes, that's correct. He eventually improved, as you said, on this existing telegraph technology, famously sending the first telegraph message on May 24, 1844. But between his first day on the planet and that moment where he sends the first telegraph message, a lot of stuff happened and not all of it was particularly pleasant. In fact, we could say that without great personal tragedy, Morse code may not have ever come to be, you know.

[B]

And that first telegraph message that Morse sent. A little heavy, isn't it? It's what hath God wrought? That sounds sinister to me.

[A]

I like it. It's better than ahoy hoy.

[B]

That's true. Ahoehoy. Which was what famously, Mr. Burns sent on the first ever telephone call.

[A]

Right, right. So before Samuel Morse was known for his inventions, way back when Morse was just a regular surname, this guy had a completely different job, didn't he.

[B]

He did. He went to Yale. And when he graduated, what was his degree in? Ben, did you catch that?

[A]

Well, he studied several different things. He studied religious philosophy, mathematics, and equestrian.

[B]

Science, which is so interesting because he went into none of those fields. Upon graduating from Yale, he became a quite well regarded portrait painter. And a piece that he did, I was not aware of this at all. His work is pretty breathtaking. He has one piece called Dying Hercules that has that kind of Caravaggio esque look of like some of the Italian masters, like real chiaroscuro lighting. Like this dude is heavily ripped, massive pectorals and eight pack kind of back in the throes of agony, leaning up against some rocks. It's Hercules holding up this kind of like sheet as though it were like a wing. And it's really breathtaking, epic stuff. And he received some note from that work and got some really pretty big name commissions as a painter.

[A]

It's interesting because this was a masterpiece early in his life. It's typically called his early masterpiece. And just a side note, he did a sculpture of this first and he based the painting on that sculpture.

[B]

I didn't know that.

[A]

That's pretty weird, right? I wasn't aware of that technique, but I assume it's a common thing because this guy was a big deal painter. He ended up attracting the attention of notable artists of the time, such as Washington Alston, who wanted him to meet another artist named Benjamin West. And along with Morse's father, Alston arranged for Morse to stay in England for three years to study painting. And eventually, by the end of 1811, he was admitted to the Royal Academy. And this is where he began producing things like Dying Hercules. He has some portraits that are in the National Portrait Gallery now, including a self portrait.

[B]

Yeah, and I believe he did one.

[A]

Of.

[B]

James Madison as well. And he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington in February of 1825. Oh, he also did John Adams and James Monroe. And that was when unfortunately, tragically, his wife Lucretia fell deathly ill.

[A]

Yes, she fell ill just a month after giving birth to their third child. And she was located in New Haven, Connecticut. And he was in Washington in February of 1825 painting that portrait. So he dropped everything, ran back to New Haven as quickly as he could. Unfortunately, he was too late. And his wife passed at the young age of 25 on February 7, 1825. And at this point, the only way that he could receive notice of this would be through a written correspondence, a letter through the post or Word of mouth. Or maybe somebody sending a courier, you know what I mean? And a corvid of some kind. Yes, a Corvette courier. So his father sent him a letter about his wife's illness. And Morse did not receive this letter for several days. He wrote to his wife two days after she had died, unaware that she had passed from this earth. And he was talking to her about the election of John Quincy Adams as president, his meeting with Lafayette. And then by the time he returned to New Haven, several days had passed since her burial.

[B]

What would it have been from Washington, D.C. to New Haven, Connecticut, in those days? Which would have been by train? How would he have traveled, I wonder?

[A]

It's an interesting question. So the distance, if you're talking just a straight flight, the distance would be about 200 as the Corvette flies. Yeah, 273 miles, or 440 kilometers for, you know, the rest of the world.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So just for perspective, if someone were traveling on a train today on Amtrak, for instance, how long would that journey take?

[B]

I think only about five and a half hours or so, which kind of threw me. Cause at first when I read this, I misread and thought that he was much farther away because he had spent a lot of time overseas. But he was, in fact, not that far. But still just the same. He needed the information instantly. And that is what led him to decide he needed to devise a way of doing this so other people wouldn't have to experience what he experienced. Because he wrote a letter to his daughter after the passing of his wife that was just really heartbreaking to read.

[A]

Right? He said, you cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has been kept open. And when he learned of her death, he vowed to find some way to deliver important messages in a timely manner. And he would spend the next two decades perfecting this system.

[B]

He didn't give up the art right away, but he continued kind of tinkering away at this side hustle at the same time. And it was in 1832, when he was on another voyage, a sea voyage to Europe, or from Europe, rather, back to the United States, that he met a very important gentleman for the evolution of what would be his kind of crowning achievement.

[A]

Yes. Charles Thomas Jackson, Boston physician and scientist. And Jackson says to Morse, hey, check out this electromagnet I made. He had a rudimentary electromagnet, and Morse was inspired. And Morse thought, you know what? What if I could send a message along a Wire by opening and closing an electrical circuit. And then an electromagnet could record these blips on a piece of paper via some sort of, dare I say, a code.

[B]

Yeah, I like your thinking.

[A]

Yeah. Right. And this is one of those. I don't know. At first, it's like a cocktail napkin idea, you know, he's still what if ing to himself, but when he goes back to the US when he disembarks from the trip, he moves forward with the idea. And he meets another guy who works with electromagnets, a fellow named Joseph Henry.

[B]

Yeah, and Joseph Henry was also working with the idea of electromagnetism, which just. Quick and dirty. I'm no magnet scientist, but it is the idea of passing electric current into a magnet that turns on and off its magnetic abilities.

[A]

Right? Yeah. I mean, I'm not a magnet doctor either, but I like that phrase. But, yeah, that's. That's the basic gist.

[E]

Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles.

[D]

Our Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated. And black America was at a breaking point. Rioting in protest, but on an unprecedented scale.

[E]

In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.

[D]

To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying.

[B]

1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the.

[A]

Murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.

[D]

This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

[E]

Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

At this time, Morse still doesn't absolutely understand the nuts and bolts of how electromagnetism works. And it is Henry who explains the phenomenon of electromagnetism to Morse. And he also shows him the experimental electromagnets that he has built. And if you look at the electromagnets Morse later goes on to use, and the experimental ones that Joseph Henry created, they're obviously the same design. He's. Well, you don't wanna call it plagiarism, but he's riffing.

[B]

Well, but he did sue, I believe, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Later he did sue and said, hey, that's my idea. You can read some of this, by the way, in a fantastic Smithsonian article called How Samuel Morse Got his big Idea by Joseph Stromberg and the Smithsonian is written a couple of things about the story of Morse, because I don't remember if we mentioned this on air yet. Joseph Henry would later go on to become the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. So they have a little bit of stake in the game here, story wise. So before he gets sued, Morse and Henry are pretty good buds. They're having interesting conversations. Morse goes back to his home, which is now in New York, and in 1837, he creates his first telegraph receiver.

[B]

Which, like I said, is kind of that. That thing you see in some of these old. The old pictures where it's like a button. Exactly. On a spring and that opens and closes the circuit to indicate. Yeah. When you do the taps. That's right. And that is pretty much what it looked like. And it got sort of streamlined over time. And you can actually see this first ever version, this prototype today at the American History Museum.

[A]

And according to Harold Wallace, the curator of the American History Museum, the most interesting aspect of this is that he took an artist canvas stretcher and made it into a telegraph receiver. A canvas stretcher is what you use to stretch the canvas over a frame and affix it.

[B]

So he was kind of giving props.

[A]

To his old arts roots and to Wallace, this is symbolic of a shift from painter to telegrapher all in one piece, one artifact, which is somewhat poetic. Right. So now he theoretically has a way to record these signals and he has to figure out how to transmit them, Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He builds the receiver first, but he doesn't build a way to transmit it.

[B]

So was the infrastructure already in place for this? Because, I mean, this is obviously pre telephone.

[A]

Right. He had to work with some other people. And this is where his colleagues Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail come into play. Over the next few years, after building this receiver, Morse, still a man on a mission, works to improve this system. And he uses Vail's transmitter key and a code of dots and dashes. This would be what becomes known as Morse code. And initially people said, okay, it could be potentially useful. But they had a hard time getting investors because of the infrastructure problem that you alluded to earlier. There's not a pre existing network of miles and miles and miles of wire. You would have to build it to send that signal. And that's something that we see with a lot of technology. One of the things people are talking about today with autonomous vehicles is how do you build a system in which they can exist?

[B]

That's right. And so in the same way that we're doing small scale tests of autonomous vehicles in private, in these private companies, and then gradually doing road tests, some of which have spectacularly failed. They did that very thing to demonstrate to potential investors that this technology did work using short runs of wires instead of the kind that would have been strung miles and miles apart to make the technology actually useful across long distances.

[A]

Yeah, that's a part of the story that I found endearing. They turned to Uncle Sam and they asked the US Government for some scratch, some cheddar, some sweet, sweet telegraph money just to construct this network, to lay these lines, to make this wire stuff happen. And the way that they convinced the government to fund it was through this sort of science fair approach. They did a live demonstration within the Capitol and they strung wires up just between different rooms.

[B]

You know what it makes me think of? There's a part in the new Red Dead redemption game where the character you play, the cowboy, I can't remember his name for some reason now. Arthur Morgan. Arthur Morgan. Great game if you haven't played it. He happens upon an inventor who has these remote control boats that are like little battleship kind of things that can like, you know, shoot missiles. And it's. The whole idea is that he wants to get investors and he rounds up rich people that are like walking around in the city that you're in to come and check out him using this wireless technology. And that was sort of a time. It was set in the same time, around the late 1800s or mid-1800s. And it was a time of that kind of ingenuity when people were so far ahead of like what investors were willing to put their money toward. You had to really wow them with some kind of display that they. It was unequivocally a thing that was going to work. And that was worth their money.

[A]

Yeah. And so they put some cash behind it. They gave Morse Co. $30,000 to build a 38 mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington D.C. and then on May 1st. Oh, should we inflation calculate that? What do you think?

[B]

Oh, of course. Whatever we can. We should. I'm going to guess $1 million.

[A]

So let's say, just for the sake of argument, let's say $1840s. And we said. What was that? 30,000. Okay, so $30,000 in the 1840s would be equal to. What did you guess?

[B]

$1 million.

[A]

Dude, you're really close. It's 980,000.

[B]

Damn.

[A]

980,000. $480.

[B]

Awesome. What do I win?

[A]

Peace of mind. I'll take it. Okay.

[B]

I need it.

[A]

I'm sure we have a T shirt somewhere. A ridiculous history T shirt.

[B]

I'm not gonna be one of those guys in the band wearing their own shirt. That's embarrassing.

[A]

I would wear a Casey of the Case shirt.

[B]

Oh, I absolutely would. That's different, though. That represents the good Mr. Pegram, not our own brand.

[A]

Do we talk about this on air? I pitched Kasey on getting a T shirt with just his face on it. You were against that, right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

[A]

I'm going to say no to that one.

[B]

Oh, man. Casey on the sad, sad case. Well, you know what? Hey, how about this, listeners? You guys speak up, let us know. Demand it. Demand Casey's face on a T shirt. Then we'll see if he changes his tune.

[A]

Oh, we are going to be in deep trouble on that one, huh?

[B]

So. Oh, yeah. So they strung up the line.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Probably along a similar route as there would have been train travel.

[A]

I imagine that would make sense. Right? That's a good point. It really gets national attention when the device is used by the Whig Party to telegraph their presidential nomination from Baltimore, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. much, much faster than an ordinary courier could have travele. And people say, holy smokes. Building this wire is a real pain. But once you have the wire up, this is very useful.

[B]

Yeah. And it makes me think of those barbed wire telephone networks, because all you need is a conductive material. There's something special about it. It just has to travel from point A to point B, and it can transmit those messages. And it's so cool because, I mean, it makes sense, but I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms in my head. The invention of the telegraph was so far removed from the events of the telephone. But that's how technology works when you're building on the work of others. Antonio Meucci, who was an Italian immigrant, started developing what was referred to as the talking telegraph. As early as 1849.

[A]

We see the concurrence or the confluence rather, of these similar technologies.

[B]

Oh, and then speaking of your parallel thinking, the Italian gentleman I just mentioned came up with his design completely independently of Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with the invention. So it just goes to show, like, it's totally a thing that happens.

[A]

It's first to the patent office sometimes. That's the way it works. Right. So Morse has finally achieved his mission, and almost 20 years later, 19, 20 years later, he has not put his tragedy to rest, but he has made something positive in the world from this terrible personal catastrophe. And that brings Us to the question that we have to ask. Would Morse code or would the telegraph have existed without this man on personal mission? The answer is yes. It just wouldn't be Morse code. We've been throwing around the phrase Morse code, and we said there are dots and dashes. What exactly is Morse code? It changed a little over time, right?

[B]

It did change a little bit over time, because like we said, you know, he had this invention that he had worked with these other inventors to achieve, including Alfred Vail, who invented his contribution to the device, which was the telegraph key, which is literally that little button that we've been talking about that allows you to, like, enter in the code. But Morse himself was credited with coming up with a system of dots, as in a short beep and then a long beep, beep versus beep. And with those, it's sort of like a Braille Alphabet, but for your ears instead of your fingers. Right, right.

[A]

And he created this code with some inspiration from earlier attempts to communicate even just line of sight over distance through visual cues. You know, semaphore kind of stuff. Yet a controversy exists. If you look at international Morse code now, we still call it Morse code, you'll see that that fairly easy to grok system. Dots and dashes or dits and dahs.

[B]

As it's referred to in the parlance of Morse. Coterie.

[A]

Yes. And I like the phrase coterie. However, many scholars will tell you that Morse code is misnamed and it should actually be called veil code due to the contributions of Alfred Vail, who collaborated with Samuel Morse. So many scholars will say that Vail, as a collaborator, was the generative force behind what we call Morse code. However, people who say that Morse invented it himself will point out that Vail, in public and private, never claimed he invented the code. And he credited Samuel Morse with the creation of the code in different private correspondence. So if you want to be a revolutionary academic, you can argue the Vail side of it. It's just many people attribute Morse code to Samuel Morse, including Alfred Vail.

[B]

Yeah. And I actually had the misconception that Morse code was sort of the way you would enter in letters alphanumerically, like in a telephone, where you know each however many you know, A is one dot, b is two, c is three. But if you think about it in a whole sentence, if you keyed things in one letter at a time like that, it would take ages to communicate any meaningful information. Right. So there's a whole nother system that makes Morse code efficient and able to have High words per minute counts, which is how Morse code transmissions are measured. But I have to say, Ben, even after reading into this stuff, maybe I'm being a little dense here. I still don't fully get, like, how the code works. Because if an s is an SOS is three Dits, an O is three DAs, an S is three Dits. How does that relate to other letters? Or is it phrase based? Maybe you can explain.

[A]

Yeah. So think of it in terms of units. So a dit or a dot. Think of it as one unit, almost like music. Okay. And a dash is three units. So dot and then a dash is D. Got it. For lack of a better vocal cue, the space between parts of the same letter would be one unit. So there's one dits space between these dits and these das. And the space between separate letters is three units. So there's a three unit space between every letter that you send out. So in an SOS, you would have that DIT, DIT, DIT. And then a space for the span of three other DITs. So people would say, okay, that stopped. That's an S. And then when.

[B]

Oh, is that why on telegrams they say stop? No, I'm sorry, Ben, keep going.

[A]

But the space between words would be seven units. So they're counting not just the Dits or the DAs, but they're counting the absence of those. And they can figure out from the spaces between letters or words what a phrase is supposed to be.

[B]

I see. And also, if I'm looking at this chart of the Alphabet and The number system, 1 through 10 or 1 through 9 and 0, it's a little easier than you might think. A is dit da B is da dit dit dit. C is da dit da dit. I like saying da and dit. It's fun. D is da dit dit. E is just one dit, F is dit dit da dit.

[A]

And going back to your question, why is it not a dit for one, dit, dit for two, dit, dit dit for three. I feel like a beat's about to drop. But one is actually dit da da da da. Seems long for one.

[B]

It does. And what we're talking about right now, this code that we're reading back to you is what became known as international Morse code, and it was adopted by the international community because incorporated the Latin Alphabet from. With some extra Latin letters and also Arabic numerals and some punctuation and some other symbols that were not accounted for in Morse's original code. So over time, Morse's basis for Morse code got phased out, and it actually ended up not even being the original Morse code that Morse created. That kind of took hold and got adopted by the international community. It was this international Morse code that was developed by Frederick Clemens Gerk, who was a German writer and journalist, and also someone that was very interested in telegraphy. And he revised that Morse code to make it make more sense, include more necessary characters that could be adopted more widely.

[A]

Yeah. So 10 years after that first telegraph line opens in 1844, there were over 23,000 miles of line or wire crossing the continent. And it hit a watershed moment as various businesses that required quick long distance communication began to use telegraph systems. Railroad companies were one of the first to the plate there. They would use it to communicate between their stations. And these telegraph companies began to pop up everywhere that you could imagine. While this was happening, countries in Europe were developing their own system of Morse code. And the code used in America was called American Morse code, or railroad Morse. And. And the code used in Europe was called Continental Morse. And so that's when they realized they need to standardize this stuff, as you pointed out, with something that everyone can agree on. And one of the things that brought this need for an international code to public attention was the use of radio communication. Invented in the 1890s. Right. And radio frequencies got longer and longer and longer. It became possible to communicate internationally. And that's when they realized, okay, if we're talking about a global level of communication, we all have to more or less be speaking the same language.

[B]

That's right. And as technology tends to do, it was subsumed by the next best thing, which became the telephone or the talking telegraph, and then radio communication or wireless. Right. Because you didn't have to have the infrastructure. It was all just done on radio waves. And that was adopted by the military for communicating between, you know, planes and such. And even though, like, for example, amateur radio enthusiasts still use Morse code, it's a little bit more of kind of a quirky holdover from the past, I believe. Ben, you were telling me that pilots and military personnel had to learn Morse code up until, I think, the 90s, right?

[A]

Yeah. Up until the 1990s, pilots were required to know how to communicate using Morse code. And up until 2007, if you wanted to get an amateur radio license, you had to pass a Morse code proficiency test. But you're right, the average person today is probably not going to communicate in Morse code, and they're probably not Going to know it. Most of us wouldn't know Morse code. I mean, I admitted at the beginning of the show that I promptly forgot it after getting whatever merit badge I was gunning for. And believe it or not, man, American Morse code. The railroad Morse code is still around. It's nearly extinct, but it's still around. And one group of people who are keeping it alive might surprise you. Sure. Amateur radio operators, I feel like that's an easy one. Civil War reenactors say what? Civil War reenactors keep American Morse code alive.

[B]

Interesting. And one that I hadn't thought about is, or something we haven't even discussed at all, is that you can also transmit Morse code visually through flashes of light and at sea to communicate between ships or for a ship to communicate with shore, they have these lamps that have shutters on them. They can flash codes to, you know, to the shore, so you can actually get messages back to shore by line of sight.

[A]

And military personnel, POWs have used Morse code through blinking to communicate the true nature of their situation in propaganda videos.

[B]

So it's got all kinds of uses still. Not to mention young lads banging on trees, stumps in the forest.

[A]

Yes, yes, yes. It's a huge industry nowadays. And that's our story. There is a point, though that we should make, and that is that the telegraph system or something like it would have developed without Samuel Morse because so many people were working on something similar. However, his personal mission, his passion to save other people from the situation that he himself encountered played a huge role in the timing of Morse code for it to become a thing when it did. It may have taken a little bit longer had one man not been so emotionally and personally driven to pursue this innovation. And you know what? I say thanks, because we couldn't have had a podcast if things like Morse code and telegraphs and later radio never existed.

[B]

I mean, certainly like one of the earliest forms of long distance communication that served as the basis for. It's just the spark of an idea. It's like, hey, what if I could communicate an idea or a thought or a message from point A to point B? That's literally what podcasting and broadcasting media of any kind is. It's all a jumping off from that simple idea.

[A]

One day we should tell the story of Farnsworth, the inventor of television. You know, he got that idea when he was a 14 year old farmhand. Well, story for another day. I like it and I've got to say, maybe we should go back rerecord this entire episode in Morse Code. What do you think?

[B]

Yeah, I don't know about that. I'll think it over.

[A]

Let us know your thoughts on Morse code. Feel free to write to us in Morse code if you wish. You can find us on Facebook. You can find us on. I almost said Amazon. I don't know if you can find us on Amazon, but we're definitely on Twitter.

[B]

This is true.

[A]

And you can find us collectively and individually on Instagram. I am Enbullen.

[B]

I am N. Bryonic Insider. You can check out our community page on Facebook, the Ridiculous Historians, where you can drop your history memes and hang out with your fellow podcast fans, enthusiasts. And check us out next time when we explore the weird story of how a stranger stray dog caused a war.

[A]

It's true. In the meantime, thanks to our super producer, Casey Pegram. Casey, I want to make eye contact with you and apologize for bringing up the KC face T shirt again. But now the more I say the phrase, the more I'm feeling it. So I don't know if this puts us on opposite sides of history, but I hope we remain friends.

[B]

We'll see who ends up on the right side of history. Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme and is always on the right side of history and the right side of our hearts, along with Gabe, our research associate, and you, Ben.

[A]

And to you as well, Noel. And you know what, to you, Samuel Morse.

[B]

Cheerio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast.

[A]

Guaranteed Human.