NEW TELEGRAPHY

Taranaki Daily News, 13 November 1934, Page 10

NEW TELEGRAPHY

MORSE CODE NO LONGER USED. HOW THE SYSTEM DEVELOPED.. Obituary: Recently passed the last dot-and-dash of the old Morse code, as employed at the Central Telegraph Office for over 70 years, says the Daily Mail. It consisted of the end of a prosaic message to the no less prosaic-sounding Kentish town of Sidcup. One is taking no risks in asserting with finality that neither the sender nor the receiver, and probably not the operator, realised that it broke a link between this year of 1934 and the time of the French Revolution. The man who made it passible for our General Post Office to go dotting--and-dashing all over the place for more than 70 years was born in those hectic days. He was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, of Charlestown, Mass., and he first' started imposing his personality on his little world not as a scientist, but as an artist, although he had shown some interest in the study of electricity while at Yale. It was as an artist that he came to England, some time before Waterloo. Twenty years were to pass before he was to put down his pencil and brushes and surround himself with coils of wire, unsightly-looking bars, and the other gadgets of a pioneer electrical inventor. It really started on his voyage back to America from this country. Gazing one day across an empty sea, he was visited by the idea of sending messages over wires by means of electro-magnets. As soon as he landed he began to experiment, and, incidentally, to starve. Samuel had a bad time. Perhaps it is as well that he didn’t know that there were worse times to come. He had the triumph of sending a message over 500 yards of wire and thought his hour of fortune had arrived. But his 'excitement proved non-infec-tious. Congress shelved the invention. England showed no interest. ' France actually “pinched” it. He tried to sell the idea to Russia, and that went wrong, too. Poor Mr. Morse had a bitter struggle, not only with the world but within his own soul.

Then, in 1843, Congress began to take notice. There was a project to erect a telegraph, based on Morse’s system, between Baltimore and Washington, and a year later it was used for' the first time. Result: Morse was put to the necessity of defending his invention in the courts. But he came out legally and officially recognised as the “original inventor of the electro-magnetic recording telegraph.” After that, all was fairly plain sailing. Austria, Belgium, France, Holland, Russia, Sweden, the Holy See, and Turkey made payments in recognition of the use of his invention in their territories. His system of signalling became indispensable to rapid communication; moreover, it was readily adaptable to light as well as sound. The world’s armies have made extensive use of it, and it is of vital importance to modern shipping. “SOS” in Morse has averted many disasters, saved many lives. And although our Post Office has discarded it, shipping, railways, aeroplanes and the fighting services will go on using it for a good many years to come.