While he did not invent the telegraph alone, and Samuel F. B. Morse worked closely with co-inventors Alfred Vail and Joseph Henry, he was the one who came up with the alphabetic and numeric code we salute on
NATIONAL MORSE CODE DAY!
Beginning in 1836, mankind could communicate instantly over long distances for the first time.
Before you could say Modern Times, the country was crisscrossed with telegraph poles from coast to coast, with senders tapping out messages on a single key pad and receivers writing down the words signified by the series of incoming “dots” and “dashes.”
The whole process was about the speed of dial-up computer connections and was a revolution in long distance messaging, the speed of which was previously measured in weeks and months.
The first message sent was Morse’s own, “What hath God wrought?”, while one of the best telegrams ever was from Mark Twain, writing to America from London: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Morse Code is still used today, with only slight improvements and language adaptions, and the most common telegraph call is the distress signal SOS (Save Our Ship), or three dots, three dashes and three dots, an internationally recognized signal.
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