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What Is Morse Code?
James Wades • 2026-07-07
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. The question for this episode is, what is Morse Code? You will learn in this episode how Morse Code operates as a language of rhythm patterns, the difference between American Morse Code and international Morse Code, and how the telegram contributed to the world we know today. Our guest is the president of the Morse Telegraph Club, served as a technical advisor on Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, and a career engineer in railroad and telecom industries. I introduce to you James Wades. I am sitting in front of the TV, watching a documentary on... It's some kind of war documentary. I don't explicitly recall. When a story is told about a US POW who is blinking, and through his blinks, he communicates various different things that help ultimately with him being freed. And that was the first kind of exposure that I had to Morse Code. Again, a little niche use case of it. But I am curious, Jim, how did you first become interested in Morse Code?
James Wades:Well, I worked in the rail industry. And of course, as a youth, one of our neighbors was a telegraph operator for Grand Trunk Railway. And I actually learned Morse from him. Now, there's different Morse Codes that have been used historically in the United States. But the two who that kind of survived the test of time, so to speak, were the American Morse Code, which is the original code as developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Bale. And then, of course, there's international code with which most people are familiar. The American Morse Code was used in railroad operations, brokerage and commodities telegraphy, press telegraphy, just a whole bunch of, let's call them commercial telegraph disciplines, whereas the international code was developed later, and that was ultimately adopted for things like maritime communications, military communications, things of that nature, amateur radio, and so forth. But anyway, I learned American Morse from him. And of course, American Morse was used in the rail industry in some areas into the 1980s. So there's a common myth, I think, that the telegraph, you might say, disappeared with the invention of the telephone. We have a habit in our society, because we don't understand infrastructure, nor the economics associated with infrastructure. We tend to see things in kind of this binary way. But in reality, most technologies overlap for long periods of time, right? So anyway, that was my initial exposure. And then, of course, eventually, I also learned International Morse, to get radio operator's license, and things of that nature.
Dylan Carnahan:Can you, yeah, I'm interested to hear about the infrastructure, the infrastructure that was in place for telegraphy? Because that's something that, you know, most people may not be aware of how prevalent it was, and what that state looked like.
James Wades:Yeah, so, you know, the motto of Western Union at some point in the 1930s was Western Union everywhere. As a matter of fact, I've got a portable telegraph instrument up here on the shelf, and it has that on the Western Union logo. I guess I should have set it here next to the computer, so I can show you. But when you think about it, the telegraph, of course, emerges in the 1840s, and by the end of the 19th century, it's ubiquitous. Telegraph circuits are everywhere. Any kind of major public venue from courthouses to opera halls, to baseball parks, to stadiums, et cetera. And this massive infrastructure had been built out over a period of probably 50 years or whatever. And it remained in service really in some ways up until the 1970s and 80s as a legacy technology. There were a lot of economic advantages to telegraphy through the 1950s. So for example, without going into depth, as the telegraph technology evolved and also some level of automation and automatic switching emerges, it was possible to send multiple telegraph signals down a single telecommunications pair. In other words, well, good examples in the phone company, most people don't realize the phone company used manual Morse telegraphy internally for its internal communications well into the 1950s, really right up into the 1960s. And the reason for that is you could composite telegraph signals on a voice carrier. And what basically means you can use telegraph simultaneously in the background for internal company business while keeping that long distance telephone circuit in revenue service. And likewise, you know, a number of technologies emerge, particularly with the development of the vacuum tube in the early 20th century, called carrier systems, which allowed, for example, upwards of 30 telegraph signals to go down a single pair that would normally only support one voice signal. So the telegraph had great economies of scale, really through the first half of the 20th century. It isn't until the development of microwave carrier in the telephone industry that we begin to see that shift occur, where the, you know, say, voice communications and telex and things of this nature really begin to fully replace, you know, the telegraph itself.
Dylan Carnahan:I want to... That was fantastic. You brought up automatic switching. Could you elaborate on what that means?
James Wades:Yes. So when telegraphy first emerges, this, of course, would be a little easier with the PowerPoint presentation, but the original telegraph is what you call the simplex telegraph circuit. So essentially, you have battery. You have what you would call a normally closed, a current loop. And there would be a number of telegraph offices and series on these loops. And when a message moves, say, from a region to a state, or maybe a better way to say it's from a state to a region, it might go through a manual relay process and so forth. Well, eventually, telegraph technology, of course, begins to evolve. So it moves from these simplex telegraph circuits to what are called duplex telegraph circuits in which you can send two telegraph, operate two telegraph signals on a single wire. Then the quadruplex was developed by Edison, four telegraph signals on a single circuit. Then, eventually, the carrier systems are referred to earlier where you could do dozens of telegraph signals on a simple circuit. Meanwhile, what begins to happen is the emergence of teleprinters, teletype, as they're commonly called. Although teletype is a trade name, whereas teleprinter is the generic name. And as the telegraph evolves into the mid 20th century, say the 1930s, 40s, 50s, automatic switching occurs. So, you begin to see things like concentrators, where you take telegraph circuits, you have maybe a trunk available, say between two large cities, Detroit and New York, okay? And you have maybe 50 pairs available. Well, what the concentrator would do is, any time a pair was idle, it would be picked up for telegraphic communications so that all of these communication circuits are being used to maximum efficiency. And this brings us into an era of, say, automation in which you take telegraph connections, you use the, you move them to the first available pair within a trunk, and you begin to, it's sort of like trunk hunting in the, well, in the telephone industry. And interestingly, this automation sort of evolves into the Internet instead of actually taking discrete circuits and automatically routing the communications traffic. They decide to break the, the, the telegraphic content into packets, and then switching the packets through the most expeditious route. And this also gave survivability and, you know, even greater efficiency to communication. So, I'm going to burst everybody's bubble and, and, and declare that Al Gore did not invent the Internet. And, and what I would suggest is that the Internet evolved out of its predecessor technologies. Again, you know, every new technology to a large extent is predicated on those that preceded it, right? There, there, there's these incremental refinements in, in technology in, in a lot of, you know, the initial idea of course is, is unique. But then over time, research, development, engineers, and so forth, they refine practices and things begin to evolve first kind of exponentially, and then things kind of begin to level off, and then you have incremental improvements with the technology. Same thing happened with telegraph. So it starts with manual telegraph keys, simplex telegraph circuits, it evolves into multiplexing, you know, more than one telegraph circuit on a, on a, or one more than one telegraph connection on a circuit, and then it moves into this whole process of automation, beginning in the late 30s and really reaching its zenith in the 1950s.
Dylan Carnahan:Can you elaborate on, you know, I know this is a moving target because it's such a long duration, but who had access to this technology? Was this something, you know, the average person at home did? You know, was this mostly commercial?
James Wades:So no, it's really, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the telegraph is to the average person, it's essentially invisible, right? So in the, through the era of passenger rail service, the public regularly encountered telegraphy. You would go to the train depot and you would hear the operator receiving Form 19 or Form 31 train orders by telegraph, railroad messages, in many cases, in at least smaller towns that didn't warrant a commercial office. He might also be the Western Union representative who collected telegrams and transmitted them on behalf of customers or went ahead and delivered telegrams, you know, to the local community. And I think through, up into the 1950s, people had some connection to the telegraph. But with the demise of railroad passenger service and the, the, say, the rise of direct dial long distance service in the late 50s, early 60s, the telegraph kind of disappears from the public consciousness. As a general rule, the telegraph was used by a certain set of industries. Obviously, commercial telegraph services like Western Union, Postal Telegraph, Canadian National Telegraph, Canadian Pacific Telegraph, etc. These commercial telegraphy really is a term that refers to telegraphs, right? You know, sending and receiving telegrams on behalf of third parties. But there was also a wide variety of users that were invisible to the public. So in the pantheon of telegraph operators, the best telegraph operators worked for stock brokerages and commodities exchanges. These were the operators who handled these large financial transactions day in and day out. Their communications had to be flawless. Their administrative skills had to be top notch. You didn't want to make a mistake with a $10,000 or $100,000 transaction. So, stock brokerages and commodities exchanges. So for example, the Chicago Board of Trade used telegraphy until 1972 to communicate with subordinate exchanges. The stock brokerages, so stock and commodities is one example. Then of course, you have press telegraphy. So in the probably for the first, I don't know, 60 years of the 20th century, teletypes are bulky and heavy. So whenever an important news event was occurring, a telegrapher would be sent with a small portable telegraph set to important news events and he would transmit the articles written by reporters to their newspaper. So press telegraphers were probably next in line in terms of skill and abilities. A good press telegrapher using Phillips Code could send really a news article as fast as a man could type it. And so press telegraphy was, at least for the origination of news stories from the field, was very common up into the 1960s. So that's press telegraphy. Then of course, a wide variety of industries used it. As I alluded to earlier, the phone company was a major user of manual telegraphy. Pipeline companies, for example, Buckeye Pipeline, Standard Oil, coordinating the filling of tanks and operation of pipelines. A lot of that was by telegraph. So there's all these hidden uses of telegraphy that the average person really doesn't know about because they weren't involved in these industries.
Dylan Carnahan:No, I appreciate you walking through those. It's evident the importance of that, although that may not have been visibly apparent. You mentioned Phillips Code.
James Wades:Yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:What is that?
James Wades:Okay. So a gentleman originally associated with Associated Press, that didn't come out right, originally employed by Associated Press, was Walter P. Phillips. Walter Phillips was a press telegrapher and he developed a telegraphic shorthand called Phillips Code. And we still encounter Phillips Code today as colloquialisms and kind of in the vernacular of media. So for example, when somebody says POTUS or SCOTUS, right? Well, POTUS is the Phillips Code abbreviation for President of the United States. SCOTUS is the abbreviation for Supreme Court of the United States. And what the Phillips Code is, it's really a telegraphic shorthand. So I've got a key here. Let me see if I can turn this up here. Let's see. Can you hear this okay?
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah.
James Wades:Okay. So before, let me give you a common example. So before, before Microwave Carrier, when baseball teams were playing an away game, the radio announcers did not travel with the team. They stayed at home at the local broadcast station. And what would occur is that Western Union would dispatch a telegraph operator to the ballpark. Let's say the New York Yankees are playing in Detroit. The play-by-play team would be located at the radio station in New York. A telegraph operator would be at the ballpark in Detroit. And he would be sending the play-by-play back to the radio team in New York City. And he would use Phillips Code. So for example, and this was done with the Telegraph Sounder. I'm using an oscillator today because more people in the world have heard Morse Code in tone than they do with the clicking and clacking of the Telegraph Sounder. So for example, if I send, okay, that's strike one called, okay. Now batting four. Now batting four, right? Strike two fanned. I'm sorry. Strike two fanned. If you, and Phillips Code had a whole range of abbreviations. So for example, this is Yesterday Morning. Okay. Is y, a is da-da, m is da-da. So y, a, m is Yesterday Morning. Tomorrow Afternoon. Da, da-da, da, da-da. Now this is American Morse Code, which is what, you know, the press telegraphy, the code press telegraphy use. So TWP is Tomorrow Afternoon. And going is GG. One funny story I can tell about this. I knew a gentleman who was a press telegraph operator in, in, during World War II. And he worked for a large newspaper out East. And he, he was sitting there in front of his mill, which is the term telegraphers use for an all capital typewriter. And he's copying a news story. And he finishes up the news story, hands it to the wire editor, wire editor walks out of the room, comes back a few minutes later. And he wants to know what the deal is with this battle of yesterday afternoon. Well, you know, when, when you're a really good telegraph operator, you tend to, your brain kind of separates the hemispheres, and you can be talking to somebody and copying on the mill. And well, what it was, it was the battle of the island of Yap. Okay. But YAP is the Phillips Code abbreviation for yesterday afternoon. So in just this habitual way, he took the Phillips Code abbreviation, and he transcribed it not as the battle of the island of YAP, it was the battle of yesterday afternoon. And of course, they figured out what it transpired. But you can send a press story very quickly, just like you can do baseball play-by-play. As a matter of fact, I would be willing to bet anybody listening that I can send a baseball play-by-play faster in Phillips Code and American Morse Code, then they can speak it over a microphone or a telephone line, right? So for press telegraphy, it had a lot of efficiency. If you're any kind of major news event, you would see a team of telegraph operators representing different wire services and major newspapers and things of this nature.
Dylan Carnahan:Just you kind of walking through the play-by-play. Mean, that was very fast. And I'm sure many people listening are going, Jim, how did, what you just did mean that? So could you talk about how Morse Code characters are structured?
James Wades:Yeah. So again, there's at various times in our history, there have been four Morse Codes commonly used in North America, right? So the two that really survived for the original American Morse Code developed by more Samuel Morse and Alfred Bale. And then of course, the International Code, which comes out a little bit later. And I'll briefly explain the differences between the two. So the American Morse Code, well, let's talk about what Morse Code is, I guess, first. It's a language of rhythm patterns. Most people have a very simplistic view of it. You know, they say, well, dot dash is A, you know, dash dot dot dot is B. And they imagine copying or transmitting Morse Code as sort of this kind of annoying translation process of dots and dashes. But that's not actually how it works with a proficient telegraph operator. It becomes a language of rhythm patterns. Just as, say, for example, you might be bilingual or multilingual. You can speak, say, Spanish and English. And if you're proficient in Spanish and English, you can think in both languages. You know, you don't hear a word, you don't work your way through a translation process, you just hear it. So, the telegraph operator learns just like a child in kindergarten. He learns the rhythm pattern of each letter, right? So, for example, A is da-da, you know, B is da-da-da-da. In American Morse Code, C is da-da-da. There's a little internal space in there, you know, and so on. And so, you start with your ABCs. And, you know, you're pretty inefficient when you first start learning the Morse Code. Because, again, you're, you know, you're recognizing these rhythm patterns, you're writing down the letters, and you're turning them in kind of this process in your head. But what happens over time is, like any form of brain plasticity, you begin to develop a vocabulary. And you begin to identify the simple words first, the ands, the those, the office call sign. So, for example, if you're a relatively new well-read telegrapher, and your office call is W-Y for Waverly Yard, and the dispatcher calls you, so it might be something like this. Or, so I'm sorry, he's going to call the yard, so it's... So I said Waverly, Waverly, dispatcher, okay? Da-da-da, da-da-da-da, is Waverly, okay, W-Y. That's one of the first things you'll learn to recognize, is your office call. It's like somebody calling your name, right? And so eventually what happens is, Morse Code becomes a language. And so, for example, I can be driving down the road and I can listen to a high-speed conversation in Morse and it's like listening to your podcast. Okay, it just becomes another language. But ultimately, I guess the short answer to your question is, Morse Code is really a language of rhythm patterns. And that's also what makes it kind of unique. It makes it kind of the cockroach of communications because it's very survivable. You can send a Morse Code message with anything, a car horn, a flashlight. As you alluded to, I forget the gentleman's name who sent the word torture with his eyelids, the POW in Vietnam and I apologize for not recalling his name, but you can communicate between cells in a POW camp by scratching Morse Code on the wall. There's all kinds of ways you can use Morse Code. That makes it really a very personal language. There's another thing in Morse Code that I think the public overlooks and maybe even some inexperienced radio amateurs and hobbyists overlook, and that is the telegraph operator will trend toward eliminating unnecessary language because by definition he sends slower than he can speak. Whereas if you hand somebody a two-way radio and a microphone, they will tend to add unnecessary language. And so the telegraph operator will trend toward efficiency, whereas a voice operator or even in our e-mails, we trend toward adding unnecessary language. You know, I'm fond of saying that the definition of Victorian writing is that never use five words when 100 will do. But you know, that kind of applies to the e-mail world we live in. And quite frankly, if you take like a public safety radio circuit or military radio circuit, strict rules of discipline have to be enforced in order to retain some level of efficiency on a voice communication circuit, that's generally not a problem in telegraphy. And so if you take a radio telegraph network and you place it side by side with a voice network and you give them an equal amount of communications traffic to handle, surprisingly, the telegraph circuit is often more efficient than the voice circuit. Again, because of the way the human mind operates and this illusion that when we're talking, we have plenty of what's called circuit capacity. If you have one hour on a communication circuit, well that gives you essentially 60 minutes to send a file of message traffic. And people tend to use it poorly when they're engaged in voice communications. So, for example, there's some military organizations in the world that still use radio telegraphy. The Israeli Defense Forces are probably the best known. There's ham radio operators still use it pretty extensively because it's also very resistant to what's called RF propagation anomalies, fading, signal distortions, things of this nature, that can be problematic with voice communications. CW, as it's called, and amateur radio is usually superior in some way. I guess I've digressed significantly from your question.
Dylan Carnahan:No, that was all very interesting. No, it's interesting too, the hubris a little bit, and also talking about that medium, if you will, requires being more concise and that we've, I guess maybe in a way, abused our ability of these other communication formats.
James Wades:Yeah, I mean, you look at my email inbox, I bet I get several hundred emails a day, okay? And it takes time to process through those. I have to do a degree of gatekeeping. And quite often, you know, there's a high degree of extraneous information in each email, which is really not essential to my business day, right, or my work day. The, you know, I often joke that, you know, the telegraph companies had the right idea, they charged by the word. And you really think about it, you know, if we charged by the word for an email, you would probably have a lot less spam in your box. And you would probably get business emails that are two sentences long versus 20. And the efficiency of your business operation would probably improve, you know, improve significantly. And of course, it's a bit, you know, a bit, you know, humorous by intent. But I think there's an element of truth in it really.
Dylan Carnahan:When going back to just kind of hearing you try to communicate various different things from Morse Code and kind of this whole rhythmic pattern, what advice would you have for people that are kind of interested in that and kind of, you know, again, I'm sure many people, they heard some of that and struggled to kind of comprehend it.
James Wades:Yeah. So, you know, again, Morse Code, I think if you have an interest in something like radio communications, let's say you want to get a ham radio license, okay? I think the difference between Morse Code and other methods of communications is Morse Code is fundamentally an art form. So, I'm going to use a, I'm a fly fisherman, so I'm going to use a fly fishing analogy, okay? Fly fishing is an art, whereas, for example, bait fishing is kind of just a hobby. I have no problem with, you know, regular spin casters or, you know, whatever you want to fish for. I think it's great long as you're responsible and you respect the natural resource and so on. But in fly fishing, you know, it's kind of, you have to practice the casting techniques. You have to know how to present a dry fly to a rising trout. You have to menu your line. You have to understand the aquatic life cycle of insect and insect hatches, a little bit about, you know, aquatic biology and limnology and things of this nature. It's kind of this art form that you practice, you can always work to cast better. You know, if you tie your own flies, do a better job. There's kind of this holistic art form associated with fly fishing. Whereas I could take a spin casting outfit and teach 12 year old kid to spin cast for bass and maybe 15, 20 minutes, right? It's not difficult to do. I think telegraphy is kind of like an art form. For example, in amateur radio, there's a lot of digital modes today. And, you know, there's kind of a joke that, you know, my computer worked Europe today. Or my computer worked, you know, the Middle East today. To me, it's a little bit like operating a microwave oven. It's a lot of fun to make all the technology interface and make it work. And, you know, there's the technical end of it. But once it's all put together and it's working, there are some of the thrill is gone, right? It's like operating an appliance. And again, I don't mean that as a pejorative, you know, it's to each their own. But telegraphy is kind of this art form that you can practice. And it's a challenge. And I think like anything from, be it sewing or, you know, whatever, you know, there's an art to it. So, I, and the benefit, at least in amateur radio communications, is that, you know, you can take a little portable HF radio and a key and a battery and go out into the middle of nowhere and communicate. You don't need a lot of peripherals. You don't need a laptop. You don't need any interface cables. It's very simple. It's very reliable. And again, it's the cockroach of communications. But I mean that in a good way.
Dylan Carnahan:Taking a step back, I know we've kind of touched on a couple of these, but what are some other things that are commonly misunderstood about telegraphy or Morse Code that you'd like to discuss?
James Wades:Again, I think the main thing that's well, I think the main thing that's misunderstood is really, I think there's a myth that it's efficient or inefficient, I should say. There's a myth that it's inefficient. But in reality, it's very, I think that's the big one. I think the other myths that you encounter are mainly historical myths. For example, some years back, a guy named Tom Standage wrote a book, and it's a very good book called The Victorian Internet. And I would recommend it, but it has a significant flaw in that it implies, I don't know if it overtly says it, but it infers, I guess you might say that, as soon as the phone was invented, the telegraph became obsolete, like in say the 1870s, 1880s, kind of cuts off the entire latter half of the telegraph history. And again, it implies that the telephone and telegraph technology were somehow mutually exclusive. And yet there's this ironic historical fact that even the phone company was using the telegraph well into the mid-20th century. So I think that's the other issue. And I think it's like any art form. Learning most art forms is very, there's a struggle. For example, you want to learn to play the piano or the guitar, right? The first year you're learning to play the piano or guitar, it's pretty frustrating. Developing the technique, developing kind of the, let's call it, neuromuscular, you know, skills and muscle memory that's necessary. There's so many different things to think about, hand position and so on. You're thinking about all these things at once, trying to learn to play the guitar or the piano or a musical instrument. But eventually some of those things become automatic. And then one day you realize, hey, I can play a little bit of Bach or I can play a little Chopin, you know, and I can play, you know, maybe a little bit of jazz. And you start realizing, okay, now it's fun. And I think telegraphy is the same way. It's a little bit cumbersome and annoying when you first start to learn it. But once you become proficient, where it becomes sort of like a natural language, then it becomes fun. And you kind of get addicted to it in a way.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no. Once you have a base level of competency, you can kind of engage with the domain in a way that you can kind of relate to it further. I'm curious, we kind of talked about Morse Code kind of changing a little bit and the distinction between American and international. What is the current state of Morse Code?
James Wades:Yeah, so of course, American Morse Code has kind of faded away with, let's call it landline or commercial telegraphy. Let's talk, I guess I should mention, okay, why are there two codes? Why did American Morse Code not just stay the standard all over the world? So if you listen to American Morse Code as it was originally designed, certain characters have internal spaces. So for example, this is the letter C. Can you hear that internal space? Okay, this is Y. Okay, did it, did it. Okay, Z. Okay, and R. And so on. So it's very much a dot-driven code and it has internal spaces within the characters. So when you send Morse Code, if I send the alphabet, I might go. Okay, that's A, B, C, right? You can hear there's a space between each letter. Now, if I ascend the words and and the, I'll do it very slowly. Here, there's a longer space between the words, right? So there's really three elements, or let's call them four elements, in the Morse codes, one of which is, of course, the length of the impulse, the dot, the dash, and of course, the internal space between letters and the internal space between words. So you might call these four elements of the Morse code. If you go ahead and, on a nice, clean, crisp circuit, you can send a lot of traffic in American Morse Code, and it's about 10 to 15 percent more efficient than what's called the International Code. So from about maybe the beginning of telegraphy through the 1860s, American Morse Code was the standard code. But when they first laid the undersea cable between Europe and the Americas, they realized that they didn't fully understand things like inductive and capacitive reactants. There was no such thing as submerged repeaters. And so what you ended up with were signal distortions. Essentially, the pulses get rounded off and distorted by reactants in these long current loops that were running underneath the ocean. And as a result, they needed something other than the on-off function. What they ended up with is called polar keying. That is, a dot is negative, a dash is positive, and you can use a mirror galvanometer or what's called a siphon recorder to print out the Morse Code characters. The problem is, is the spaced characters in American Morse Code were not suited to this. Okay, so you needed a code that was more binary. So you only have dots and dashes, no internal spaces. So, for example, this is C in American Morse. And this is C in, let me do it slower. Okay. That's C in American Morse. This is C in International Code. See, there's no internal space, okay. R is in American Morse. This is R in International. This is D dotted. Okay. And so this committee met in Europe to develop a new international standard. And the other limitation of the American Morse Code is very much centered on the English language. There was no room for things like umlauts and some of the additional characters you encounter in other nations, right? For example, the Russian alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, has more characters than our alphabet. So the committee met and they developed a new Morse Code that eliminated the spaced characters, kind of harmonized this process, and added new characters for other languages and symbols. And this became International Morse. Now, when International Morse has developed, the American and Canadian and Mexican telegraph industries were already so well established in North America that they weren't going to retrain tens of thousands of telegraph operators. So the commercial telegraph companies, the railroads, the stock brokerages, they still stayed with the older American Morse. And then in Europe, for example, the British Post Office, the Australian Post Office, they used International Code. That was, became the standard in pretty much the rest of the world. Then, of course, around the turn of the 20th century, radio communications emerges. And because shipping and so forth is international, radio operators were licensed and qualified on the new international code. That became the standard for like maritime communications, military communications, amateur radio communications, things that are kind of more international in nature. And so that's the difference between the codes. So that gives you some insights, I think, into why there's these different codes and what the evolution was. Is that helpful?
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, that certainly is. That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you going through that. In general, I mean, how can people, you know, from your perspective, going through your journey, what would be the best way for someone to learn more about telegraphy?
James Wades:Well, I think, you know, certainly you can go to, there's an organization of retired railroad and commercial telegraph operators and former telegraph industry employees, historians and others with an interest in telegraphy and its history. It's called the Morse Telegraph Club. And its website is morristelegraphclub.com. Don't go to the dot org. The website was stolen by a gambling syndicate from Malta. And they tried selling it back for ransom. And the club just went ahead and got.com. So they weren't going to pay the extortion fee. So you'll find there's a morristelegraphclub.org. But it's a static website. It's just sitting there. Go to morristelegraphclub.com. But the Morse Telegraph Club publishes a quarterly journal called Dots and Dashes, which is available to members. It used to be, you had to be employed. You had to have been employed by a telegraph operator to be a member. But of course, the world's not producing any more telegraph operators for the most part. So, you know, it's open to anybody with an interest in the history. So certainly the Morse Telegraph Club is an option for those that are interested in the history of telecommunications and telegraphy and the like. Now, if you have an interest, say, for example, in Ham Radio, Morse Code is no longer required to obtain the Ham Radio license. But what people are finding is that people get the Ham Radio license, they play with voice and digital modes for a while, they get a little bit bored with them, and they want to challenge, and they end up discovering Morse Code. And there's an organization called the Long Island CW Club, L-I-C-W, Long Island CW Club, which teaches people Morse Code, International Morse Code. And most of the people who join are Ham Radio operators, but there's a surprising level of interest, almost a resurgence of interest in the amateur radio community in what they call CW, military call it CW as well, radio telegraphy. And that's a great resource. They have online forums where you learn how to send, you learn character recognition, they walk you through the whole process. It's all done via Zoom. So all you need is a computer. You can be anywhere in the world and join the Long Island CW Club. It started obviously in Long Island, you know, New York area, but it's really got members all over the world right now.
Dylan Carnahan:Those are those are excellent resources. You can expect me to put those resources in the show notes for this specific episode. I have I've great greatly enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate you coming on. And with that, I just want to say thank you for sharing your knowledge and your time today.
James Wades:Well, thank you for the opportunity. I do appreciate it. And, you know, any time it's been it's been fun. Glad to do it.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with James. We talked about the massive infrastructure of early Telegraphy and its evolutionary link to the Internet, Phillips Code and the modern organizations keeping the art form of Morse Code alive today. Go to this episode show notes to see any resources James mentioned during our episode. Lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening and remember to keep asking questions.