February 28, 2019 • 33 mins
The telegraph and the communication system known as Morse code revolutionized the way we transmit information, but how did it get here? Join the guys as they explore the tragic life and time of Samuel Morse.
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
No, did you ever have to learn Morse code? No? God,
that was not a very interesting responsible Let me make
something up. Yeah, totally. When I was in cub Scouts
and we went on a camping trip into the wilderness,
so we had to want how to communicate by tapping
our trees bark. Well. When I was back in Boy Scouts,
(00:45):
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, uh,
you gotta learn Morse code, buddy. It's just it's been
too long, you know what I mean. You're eleven, now
it's getting real. You've got to learn Morse code. And
so eventually I learned Morse code, passed the test with it,
(01:09):
and then promptly forgot it. Yeah. When you turn eleven,
you get your first big boy bike and you learn
Morse code, right right. And that's for late bloomers, uh,
not for early adopters like our super producer Casey Pegrum.
Give him a hand, folks. Today's episode is about Morse code,
(01:30):
but more importantly, it's about the man himself, the Morseman.
The Morseman. Not to be confused with some sort of norseman. No, no,
that's a hard and yeah. Yeah, the man, the myth,
the Morseman, the Morseman, Samuel Morseman morse So Samuel morse
born April today. He is remembered primarily for the code
(01:55):
system that bears his name, Morse Code. And everyone knows
what that is. Casey, can we get just the little
clip of how that would sound? There? You go perfect,
So like a series of short beeps and then long ones.
And if you're really good at it, you can do it.
(02:15):
You know, I would do it more like dot dot
dash dot dot dat. But if you're really good and
you can work one of those little flipper paddle button
things you know that you see in the old movies,
you'd be pretty brett baby bree b ba ba by
by know. I mean, like that's more a code a telegraph, yeah, telegraph,
which he's also credited with. He didn't really invent it exactly,
but he improved upon a previous design and made it
(02:37):
much more useful in relaying information more or less instantaneously. Yeah,
that's the thing. So most inventions that we think of
as the the huge game changing innovations. Most of those
are not going to 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 know,
(03:00):
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. Yes,
that's correct. He he eventually improved, as he said, on
this existing telegraph technology, famously sending the first telegraph message
on May. But between his first day on the planet
(03:25):
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. And now and that first telegraph messages that
more sent a little heavy, and then it's, uh, what
(03:48):
hath god roch? That sounds sinister to me? I like it.
It's better than ahoihoi, that's truehoihoi, which was what famously
Mr Burns sent on the first ever telephone call, right
right so before Samuel Morse was known for his inventions,
Way back when Morse was just a regular surname. This
(04:11):
guy had a completely different job, didn't he He did.
He went to Yale um and when he graduated was
his degree in ben Did you catch that well? He
studied several different things. He studied religious philosophy, mathematics, and
equestrian science, which is so interesting because he went into
none of those fields. Upon graduating from Yale, he became
(04:35):
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 charge
scuro lighting Like this dude is heavily ripped, massive pectorals
(04:57):
and eight pack kind of back in the throw of agony,
leaning up against some rocks. Hercules um holding up this
kind of like sheet as though or like a wing.
And it's really breathtaking epics stuff. And he received some
note from that work, and um got some really pretty
big name commissions as a painter. It's interesting because this
was a masterpiece early in his life. It's typically called
(05:20):
his early masterpiece. And just a side note, he did
a sculpture of this first, and he based the painting
on that sculpture. I didn't know that. 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 at
(05:41):
the time, such as Washington Allston, 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
eighteen eleven he is admitted to the Royal Academy and
(06:02):
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. Yeah, and I believe
he did one of James Madison as well, and he
was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Marquis de
(06:23):
Lafayette UH in Washington in February of eighteen twenty five.
Oh he also did John Adams and James Monroe UM
and that was when unfortunately, tragically, his wife Lucretia fell
deathly ill yes, she fell ill just a month after
(06:43):
giving birth to their third child, and she was located
in new Haven, Connecticut, and he was in Washington in
February of painting that portrait. So he dropped everything, ran
ran back to New Haven as quickly as he could. Unfortunately,
(07:05):
he was too late, and his wife passed at the
young age of twenty five on February. 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 corrier, you know what I mean. And yes, a
(07:29):
corvey 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
(07:51):
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. What would have
been from Washington, d c. To New Haven, Connecticut in
those days, which would have been by train, how would
you have traveled. I wonder, it's an interesting questions. So
(08:12):
the distance, if you're talking just a straight flight, the
distance would be about two seventy three miles or fokos
for you know, the rest of the world. So just
for perspective, if someone were traveling on a train today
on Amtrak, for instance, how how long would that journey take?
I think only about five and a half hours or so,
(08:33):
which kind of threw me because at first I when
I read this, I misread and thought that he was
much further 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
(08:54):
wouldn't have to experience what he experienced, because he wrote
a letter to his daughter after the pasting of his
wife that was just really heartbreaking to read. 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.
(09:14):
And when he learned of their 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.
He didn't give up the art right away, but he
continued kind of tinkering away at this side hustle. At
(09:38):
the same time. Um, and it was an eight thirty
two and he was on another voyage, a sea voyage
to Europe. For 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. Yes,
Charles Thomas Jackson, Boston physician and scientists. And Jackson says
(10:04):
to Morse, hey, check out this electromagnet I made. He
had a rudimentary electromagnet, and Morse was inspired. And Morse thought,
you know what, I what if I could send a
message along a wire by opening and closing an electrical circuit,
and then an electro magnet could record these uh blips
(10:28):
on a piece of paper via some sort of dare
I say a code? And yeah, right, And this is
one of those I don't know at first, it's like
a a cocktail napkin idea. You know, he's he's still
what ifing to himself. But when he goes back to
(10:50):
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. Yeah, and
Joseph Henry was also working with the idea of electromagnetism,
which is just quick and dirty. I'm no magnet scientists,
but it is the idea of passing electric current into
(11:13):
a magnet that turns on and off its magnetic abilities. 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.
At this time, Morse still doesn't absolutely understand the nuts
(11:36):
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
(11:57):
on to use, and the experimental ones that Joseph Henry
aided there obviously the same design. He's um, well, you
don't want to call it plagiarism, but he's riffing, well,
but he did sue, I believe, yeah, yeah, later he
did so and said, hey, that's my idea. You can
you can read some of this, by the way, in
(12:18):
a fantastic Smithsonian article called How Samuel Morse Got His
Big Idea by Joseph Stromberg, and the Smithsonian has 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 steak in the game here story wise. So
(12:41):
before he gets sued, Morse and Henry are are pretty
good buds. They're having interesting conversations. Morse goes back to
his home, which is now in New York, and in
eighteen thirty seven he creates his first telegraph receiver. It's
like I said, is kind of that that thing you
see in some of these old the old pictures where
(13:02):
it's like a button do you exactly on a spring
and that colopens incloses the circuit to the decay. Yeah,
when you do the taps, that's right, um, 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 versions prototype today at the American History Museum.
And according to Harold Wallace, the curator of the American
(13:25):
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 used
to to stretch the canvas over a frame and a
fix it. So he was kind of given props to
his old arts roots and to Wallace, this is symbolic
(13:48):
of a shift from painter to telegrapher, all in one piece,
one artifact. That's pretty cool, somewhat poetic. Right. So now
he theoretically has a way to record these signal and
he has to figure out how to transmit them. Right.
He builds a receiver first, but he doesn't build a
way to transmit it. So was the infrastructure already in
(14:09):
place for this, because I mean this is obviously pre telephone, right,
He had to work with some other people and this
is where his colleagues Leonard Gail 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 veils, transmitter key, and a code of
(14:32):
thoughts 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 UH network of miles and
(14:55):
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?
That's right, and so in the same way that we're
doing small scale tests about times vehicles UH in private
in these private companies and then gradually doing road tests,
(15:17):
some of which have spectacularly failed. Um, 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. Yeah,
that's a part of the story that I found endearing.
(15:39):
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 pro They did a live demonstration
(16:01):
within the capital and they strove wires up just between
different rooms. You know what makes me think of um,
there's a part in the new Red Dead Redemption game
where the character you play, the cowboy I can't remember
his names for some reason now, Arthur Morrigan, Arthur Morgan.
Great game if you haven't played it. He happens upon
an inventor who has these remote control boats that are
(16:23):
like little battleship kind of things that can like, you know,
shooting missiles. And it's the whole idea is that he
wants to get investors, and he um 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 at the same time around the late eighteen hundreds
or mid eighteen hundreds, and it was a time of
that kind of ingenuity when people were so far ahead
(16:46):
of like what investors were willing to put their money toward.
You had to really wow them with some kind of
display that they was unequivocally a thing that was going
to work and that was worth their money. Yeah, and
so they put some cash behind it. They gave Morse
and Co. Thirty thousand dollars to build a thirty eight
(17:07):
mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland, to Washington, D C.
And then on May one, should we inflation calculate that?
Of course, whenever we can, we should. I'm gonna guess
one million dollars. So let's say, just for the sake
of argument, and say eighteen forties dollars. And we said,
(17:30):
what was that? Thirty thousand? Okay, so thirty thousand dollars
in the eighteen forties would be equal to what did
you guess? One million dollars? Dude? You really close. It's
nine hundred and eighty thousand, thousand, four and eighty dollars.
What do I win? Piece of mind? I'll take it, Okay,
(17:51):
I need it, Yeah, I be. I'm sure we have
a T shirt somewhere, a ridiculous history t shirt. I'm
not gonna be one of those guys. In the band
wearing their own shirt. That's embarrassing. I would wear a
Casey on the Case shirt. Oh, I absolutely Well that's
different though, that that represents the good Mr Mr Pegram,
not our own. Do we talk about this on air?
I pitched Casey on getting a T shirt with just
(18:15):
his face on it. You were against that, right, yeah?
I think so. I'm gonna say no to that one
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 and
then we'll see if he changes his tune. Oh We're
(18:38):
gonna be in deep trouble on that one. Huh so.
Oh yeah. So they strung up the line, Yeah, probably
along a similar route as there would have been a
train travel. I imagine that would make sense, right, that's
a good point. It really gets national attention when the
device is used by the Wig Party to telegraph their
(18:58):
presidential nomineetion from Baltiware, Maryland, to Washington, d C. Much
much faster than an ordinary courier could have traveled. And
people say, holy smokes, building this wires is real pain.
Once you have the wire up. This is very useful. Yeah,
and and it makes me think of those barbed wire
telephone networks because all you need is a conductive material.
(19:21):
There's something special about 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 I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms.
You know, in my head, the invention of the telegraph
was so far removed from the invention of the telephone.
But that's how technology works when you're building on the
work of others. Antonio mucci Um, who was an Italian immigrant,
(19:44):
started developing what was referred to as the talking telegraph
as early as eighteen forty nine. We see the concurrence,
or the confluence rather of these similar technologies and then
the speaking of your parallel thinking. The Italian gentleman I
just mentioned came up with his design completely independently of
(20:05):
Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with the invention. So
it just goes to show like it's totally a thing
that happens. It's first to the patent office. Sometimes that's
the way it works, right. So Morse has finally achieved
his mission, and almost twenty years later, years later, he
has not put his tragedy to rest, but he has
(20:28):
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 with 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
(20:53):
the phrase Morse code, and we said, there are dots
and dashes, what exactly is Morse code? It changed a
little over time, right, 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 Vale, who invented his contribution to
(21:13):
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 I'm along beep
beep versus beep and with those it's sort of like
a brail alphabet, but for your ears instead of your fingers,
(21:35):
right right, 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 grock system dots and dashes
(21:59):
or ditson oz as it's referred to in the parlance
of Morris Coterie. Yes, and I like the phrase Coderie. However,
many scholars will tell you that Morse code is misnamed
and it should actually be called Veil code. Uh, due
to the contributions of Alfred Vale, who collaborated with Samuel Morse.
(22:20):
So many scholars will say that Veil, 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 Veil, in public and private, never claimed he
invented the code, and he credited Samuel Morse with the
(22:42):
creation of the code in different private correspondence. So if
you want to be a revolutionary academic, you can. You
can argue the Veil side of it. It's just many
people attribute Morse code to Samuel Morse including Alfred Vale. Yeah,
and I actually have the mis conception that UM Morse
code was sort of the way you would enter in
(23:05):
letters alpha numerically, 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 keep things in
one letter at a time like that, it would take
ages to communicate any meaningful information. Right, So there's a
whole another system that makes Morse code UM efficient and
(23:28):
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 s
O S is three dits uh and O is three
DAWs and asks three dits how how how does that
(23:49):
relate to other letters? Or is it phrase based? Like?
Maybe you can explain so think of it in terms
of units. So a dit or dot give it as
one unit almost like music, okay, and a dash is
three units, so dot and then a dashes got it
(24:10):
for lack of a better vocal que. The space between
parts of the same letter would be one unit, so
there's one dits space between these dits and these DAWs,
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 S O S, you would
(24:33):
have that dit dit and then a space for the
span of three other dits. So people would say, Okay,
that's stopped, that's an S and then what was that?
Why On telegrams they say stop now, I'm sorry, keep going.
But the the the space between words would be seven units,
(24:54):
so they're they're counting not just the dits or the DAWs,
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. I see. And also
I'm looking at this chart of the alphabet and the
number system one through ten or one through nine and zero.
(25:17):
It's a little easier than you might think. A is dit,
D B is dot dit C is do dit? I
like saying don did it's fun D is dot E
is just one dit F is dit And going back
to your question, why is it not a dit for
one for two for three, I feel like it beats
(25:38):
about to drop, but one is actually did da da
da da seems long for one? It does? And what
we're talking about right now, this this code that we're
reading back to you is what became known as International
Morris Code and it was adopted by the international community
because incorporated the Latin alphabet with some extra Latin letters
(25:59):
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 Morris created that kind of took
hold and got adopted by the international community. It was
(26:21):
this International Morse Code that was developed by Frederick Clemens Girk,
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. Yeah, so
ten years after that first telegraph line opens in eighty four,
(26:45):
there were over twenty three thousand miles of line or
wire crossing the continent, and it hit a watershed moment
as various businesses that required quick long distance communication gandy
use telegraph systems. Railroad companies were one of the first
to the plate there they would use it to communicate
(27:06):
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 the code used in Europe
was called Continental Morse. And so that's when that's when
(27:29):
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 eighteen nineties, right, and radio frequencies got
(27:50):
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. And as technology
tends to do, it was subsumed by the next best thing,
(28:10):
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.
That was adopted by the military for communicating between you know,
planes and such. And even though uh like, for example,
amateur radio enthusiasts still use Morse code, it's a little
(28:34):
bit more of kind of a quirky holdover from the past.
I believe, Ben, you were telling me that the that
pilots UM and military personnel UM had to learn Morse
code up until I think the nineties, right, Yeah, up
until the nine nineties, pilots were required to know how
to communicate using Morse code, and up until two thousand
(28:54):
and seven, if you wanted to get an amateur radio license,
you had to pass a Morse Code proficient agency tests.
But you're right, the average person today is probably not
going to communicate 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
(29:15):
that I promptly forgot it after getting whatever merit badge
I was. 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 uh, one
group of people who are keeping it alive might surprise you, sure,
(29:36):
amateur radio operators. I feel like that's that's an easy one.
Civil war reenactors, Civil war reenactors keep American morse code alive.
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 morrise code visually through flashes of light
and at sea, uh, to communicate between ships or for
(30:00):
a ship to communicate with shore. They have these lamps
that have shutters on them. They can flash codes to uh,
you know, to the shore's You can actually get messages
back to shore by line of sight, and military personnel
POWs have used morse code through blinking to communicate the
true nature their situation and prospaganda videos. It's got all
(30:21):
kinds of uses. Still, not to mention young lads banging
on tree stumps in the forest. Yes, yes, yes, it's
a huge industry nowadays. And that's our story there. 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 Morris because so many people were
(30:44):
working on something similar. However, his personal mission, his passion
to UH to save other people from the situation that
he himself encountered, played a huge role in the timing
of Morse code. For it to be come a thing
when it did. It may have taken a little bit
longer had one man not been so emotionally impersonally driven
(31:08):
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 ever existed. I mean,
certainly like one of the earliest forms of long distance
communication UH that served as the basis for It's just
like the spark of an idea. It's like, hey, what
(31:29):
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 a media of any kind is.
It's all a jumping off from that simple idea. One
day we should tell the story of Farnsworth, the inventor
of television. You know, he got that idea when he
was a fourteen year old farm hand. Well story for
(31:52):
another day, and we've got to say, maybe we should
go back re record this entire episode in morse own.
What do you think? Yeah, I don't know about that.
I'll think it over. Let us know your thoughts on
Worse Code. Feel free to write to us in Worse
Code if you wish. You can find us on Facebook.
(32:12):
You can find us on almost said Amazon. I don't
know if you can find us in Amazon, but we're
definitely on Twitter, and you can find us collectively and
individually on Instagram. I am at Ben Boland, I am
at Embryonic Insider. You can check out our community page
on Facebook. There Ridiculous Historians, where you can drop your
history memes and hang out with your fellow podcast fans enthusiasts.
(32:34):
And check us out next time when we explore the
weird story of how a stray dog caused a war.
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 Casey face T
shirt again. But now the more I say the phrase,
(32:54):
the more I'm feeling it. So I don't know if
this puts us on opposite sides of history, but I
hope we were main friends. We'll see you ends up
on the right side of history thanks to Alex Williams
who composed our theme, and it's always on the right
side of history and the right side of our hearts,
along with Gabe, our research associates, and you Ben, and
to you as well, Noll and you know what to
you Samuel Morris, cheerio,
No, did you ever have to learn Morse code? No? God,
that was not a very interesting responsible Let me make
something up. Yeah, totally. When I was in cub Scouts
and we went on a camping trip into the wilderness,
so we had to want how to communicate by tapping
our trees bark. Well. When I was back in Boy Scouts,
(00:45):
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, uh,
you gotta learn Morse code, buddy. It's just it's been
too long, you know what I mean. You're eleven, now
it's getting real. You've got to learn Morse code. And
so eventually I learned Morse code, passed the test with it,
(01:09):
and then promptly forgot it. Yeah. When you turn eleven,
you get your first big boy bike and you learn
Morse code, right right. And that's for late bloomers, uh,
not for early adopters like our super producer Casey Pegrum.
Give him a hand, folks. Today's episode is about Morse code,
(01:30):
but more importantly, it's about the man himself, the Morseman.
The Morseman. Not to be confused with some sort of norseman. No, no,
that's a hard and yeah. Yeah, the man, the myth,
the Morseman, the Morseman, Samuel Morseman morse So Samuel morse
born April today. He is remembered primarily for the code
(01:55):
system that bears his name, Morse Code. And everyone knows
what that is. Casey, can we get just the little
clip of how that would sound? There? You go perfect,
So like a series of short beeps and then long ones.
And if you're really good at it, you can do it.
(02:15):
You know, I would do it more like dot dot
dash dot dot dat. But if you're really good and
you can work one of those little flipper paddle button
things you know that you see in the old movies,
you'd be pretty brett baby bree b ba ba by
by know. I mean, like that's more a code a telegraph, yeah, telegraph,
which he's also credited with. He didn't really invent it exactly,
but he improved upon a previous design and made it
(02:37):
much more useful in relaying information more or less instantaneously. Yeah,
that's the thing. So most inventions that we think of
as the the huge game changing innovations. Most of those
are not going to 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 know,
(03:00):
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. Yes,
that's correct. He he eventually improved, as he said, on
this existing telegraph technology, famously sending the first telegraph message
on May. But between his first day on the planet
(03:25):
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. And now and that first telegraph messages that
more sent a little heavy, and then it's, uh, what
(03:48):
hath god roch? That sounds sinister to me? I like it.
It's better than ahoihoi, that's truehoihoi, which was what famously
Mr Burns sent on the first ever telephone call, right
right so before Samuel Morse was known for his inventions,
Way back when Morse was just a regular surname. This
(04:11):
guy had a completely different job, didn't he He did.
He went to Yale um and when he graduated was
his degree in ben Did you catch that well? He
studied several different things. He studied religious philosophy, mathematics, and
equestrian science, which is so interesting because he went into
none of those fields. Upon graduating from Yale, he became
(04:35):
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 charge
scuro lighting Like this dude is heavily ripped, massive pectorals
(04:57):
and eight pack kind of back in the throw of agony,
leaning up against some rocks. Hercules um holding up this
kind of like sheet as though or like a wing.
And it's really breathtaking epics stuff. And he received some
note from that work, and um got some really pretty
big name commissions as a painter. It's interesting because this
was a masterpiece early in his life. It's typically called
(05:20):
his early masterpiece. And just a side note, he did
a sculpture of this first, and he based the painting
on that sculpture. I didn't know that. 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 at
(05:41):
the time, such as Washington Allston, 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
eighteen eleven he is admitted to the Royal Academy and
(06:02):
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. Yeah, and I believe
he did one of James Madison as well, and he
was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Marquis de
(06:23):
Lafayette UH in Washington in February of eighteen twenty five.
Oh he also did John Adams and James Monroe UM
and that was when unfortunately, tragically, his wife Lucretia fell
deathly ill yes, she fell ill just a month after
(06:43):
giving birth to their third child, and she was located
in new Haven, Connecticut, and he was in Washington in
February of painting that portrait. So he dropped everything, ran
ran back to New Haven as quickly as he could. Unfortunately,
(07:05):
he was too late, and his wife passed at the
young age of twenty five on February. 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 corrier, you know what I mean. And yes, a
(07:29):
corvey 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
(07:51):
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. What would have
been from Washington, d c. To New Haven, Connecticut in
those days, which would have been by train, how would
you have traveled. I wonder, it's an interesting questions. So
(08:12):
the distance, if you're talking just a straight flight, the
distance would be about two seventy three miles or fokos
for you know, the rest of the world. So just
for perspective, if someone were traveling on a train today
on Amtrak, for instance, how how long would that journey take?
I think only about five and a half hours or so,
(08:33):
which kind of threw me because at first I when
I read this, I misread and thought that he was
much further 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
(08:54):
wouldn't have to experience what he experienced, because he wrote
a letter to his daughter after the pasting of his
wife that was just really heartbreaking to read. 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.
(09:14):
And when he learned of their 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.
He didn't give up the art right away, but he
continued kind of tinkering away at this side hustle. At
(09:38):
the same time. Um, and it was an eight thirty
two and he was on another voyage, a sea voyage
to Europe. For 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. Yes,
Charles Thomas Jackson, Boston physician and scientists. And Jackson says
(10:04):
to Morse, hey, check out this electromagnet I made. He
had a rudimentary electromagnet, and Morse was inspired. And Morse thought,
you know what, I what if I could send a
message along a wire by opening and closing an electrical circuit,
and then an electro magnet could record these uh blips
(10:28):
on a piece of paper via some sort of dare
I say a code? And yeah, right, And this is
one of those I don't know at first, it's like
a a cocktail napkin idea. You know, he's he's still
what ifing to himself. But when he goes back to
(10:50):
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. Yeah, and
Joseph Henry was also working with the idea of electromagnetism,
which is just quick and dirty. I'm no magnet scientists,
but it is the idea of passing electric current into
(11:13):
a magnet that turns on and off its magnetic abilities. 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.
At this time, Morse still doesn't absolutely understand the nuts
(11:36):
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
(11:57):
on to use, and the experimental ones that Joseph Henry
aided there obviously the same design. He's um, well, you
don't want to call it plagiarism, but he's riffing, well,
but he did sue, I believe, yeah, yeah, later he
did so and said, hey, that's my idea. You can
you can read some of this, by the way, in
(12:18):
a fantastic Smithsonian article called How Samuel Morse Got His
Big Idea by Joseph Stromberg, and the Smithsonian has 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 steak in the game here story wise. So
(12:41):
before he gets sued, Morse and Henry are are pretty
good buds. They're having interesting conversations. Morse goes back to
his home, which is now in New York, and in
eighteen thirty seven he creates his first telegraph receiver. It's
like I said, is kind of that that thing you
see in some of these old the old pictures where
(13:02):
it's like a button do you exactly on a spring
and that colopens incloses the circuit to the decay. Yeah,
when you do the taps, that's right, um, 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 versions prototype today at the American History Museum.
And according to Harold Wallace, the curator of the American
(13:25):
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 used
to to stretch the canvas over a frame and a
fix it. So he was kind of given props to
his old arts roots and to Wallace, this is symbolic
(13:48):
of a shift from painter to telegrapher, all in one piece,
one artifact. That's pretty cool, somewhat poetic. Right. So now
he theoretically has a way to record these signal and
he has to figure out how to transmit them. Right.
He builds a receiver first, but he doesn't build a
way to transmit it. So was the infrastructure already in
(14:09):
place for this, because I mean this is obviously pre telephone, right,
He had to work with some other people and this
is where his colleagues Leonard Gail 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 veils, transmitter key, and a code of
(14:32):
thoughts 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 UH network of miles and
(14:55):
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?
That's right, and so in the same way that we're
doing small scale tests about times vehicles UH in private
in these private companies and then gradually doing road tests,
(15:17):
some of which have spectacularly failed. Um, 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. Yeah,
that's a part of the story that I found endearing.
(15:39):
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 pro They did a live demonstration
(16:01):
within the capital and they strove wires up just between
different rooms. You know what makes me think of um,
there's a part in the new Red Dead Redemption game
where the character you play, the cowboy I can't remember
his names for some reason now, Arthur Morrigan, Arthur Morgan.
Great game if you haven't played it. He happens upon
an inventor who has these remote control boats that are
(16:23):
like little battleship kind of things that can like, you know,
shooting missiles. And it's the whole idea is that he
wants to get investors, and he um 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 at the same time around the late eighteen hundreds
or mid eighteen hundreds, and it was a time of
that kind of ingenuity when people were so far ahead
(16:46):
of like what investors were willing to put their money toward.
You had to really wow them with some kind of
display that they was unequivocally a thing that was going
to work and that was worth their money. Yeah, and
so they put some cash behind it. They gave Morse
and Co. Thirty thousand dollars to build a thirty eight
(17:07):
mile wire line from Baltimore, Maryland, to Washington, D C.
And then on May one, should we inflation calculate that?
Of course, whenever we can, we should. I'm gonna guess
one million dollars. So let's say, just for the sake
of argument, and say eighteen forties dollars. And we said,
(17:30):
what was that? Thirty thousand? Okay, so thirty thousand dollars
in the eighteen forties would be equal to what did
you guess? One million dollars? Dude? You really close. It's
nine hundred and eighty thousand, thousand, four and eighty dollars.
What do I win? Piece of mind? I'll take it, Okay,
(17:51):
I need it, Yeah, I be. I'm sure we have
a T shirt somewhere, a ridiculous history t shirt. I'm
not gonna be one of those guys. In the band
wearing their own shirt. That's embarrassing. I would wear a
Casey on the Case shirt. Oh, I absolutely Well that's
different though, that that represents the good Mr Mr Pegram,
not our own. Do we talk about this on air?
I pitched Casey on getting a T shirt with just
(18:15):
his face on it. You were against that, right, yeah?
I think so. I'm gonna say no to that one
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 and
then we'll see if he changes his tune. Oh We're
(18:38):
gonna be in deep trouble on that one. Huh so.
Oh yeah. So they strung up the line, Yeah, probably
along a similar route as there would have been a
train travel. I imagine that would make sense, right, that's
a good point. It really gets national attention when the
device is used by the Wig Party to telegraph their
(18:58):
presidential nomineetion from Baltiware, Maryland, to Washington, d C. Much
much faster than an ordinary courier could have traveled. And
people say, holy smokes, building this wires is real pain.
Once you have the wire up. This is very useful. Yeah,
and and it makes me think of those barbed wire
telephone networks because all you need is a conductive material.
(19:21):
There's something special about 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 I just wasn't thinking about it in these terms.
You know, in my head, the invention of the telegraph
was so far removed from the invention of the telephone.
But that's how technology works when you're building on the
work of others. Antonio mucci Um, who was an Italian immigrant,
(19:44):
started developing what was referred to as the talking telegraph
as early as eighteen forty nine. We see the concurrence,
or the confluence rather of these similar technologies and then
the speaking of your parallel thinking. The Italian gentleman I
just mentioned came up with his design completely independently of
(20:05):
Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with the invention. So
it just goes to show like it's totally a thing
that happens. It's first to the patent office. Sometimes that's
the way it works, right. So Morse has finally achieved
his mission, and almost twenty years later, years later, he
has not put his tragedy to rest, but he has
(20:28):
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 with 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
(20:53):
the phrase Morse code, and we said, there are dots
and dashes, what exactly is Morse code? It changed a
little over time, right, 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 Vale, who invented his contribution to
(21:13):
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 I'm along beep
beep versus beep and with those it's sort of like
a brail alphabet, but for your ears instead of your fingers,
(21:35):
right right, 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 grock system dots and dashes
(21:59):
or ditson oz as it's referred to in the parlance
of Morris Coterie. Yes, and I like the phrase Coderie. However,
many scholars will tell you that Morse code is misnamed
and it should actually be called Veil code. Uh, due
to the contributions of Alfred Vale, who collaborated with Samuel Morse.
(22:20):
So many scholars will say that Veil, 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 Veil, in public and private, never claimed he
invented the code, and he credited Samuel Morse with the
(22:42):
creation of the code in different private correspondence. So if
you want to be a revolutionary academic, you can. You
can argue the Veil side of it. It's just many
people attribute Morse code to Samuel Morse including Alfred Vale. Yeah,
and I actually have the mis conception that UM Morse
code was sort of the way you would enter in
(23:05):
letters alpha numerically, 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 keep things in
one letter at a time like that, it would take
ages to communicate any meaningful information. Right, So there's a
whole another system that makes Morse code UM efficient and
(23:28):
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 s
O S is three dits uh and O is three
DAWs and asks three dits how how how does that
(23:49):
relate to other letters? Or is it phrase based? Like?
Maybe you can explain so think of it in terms
of units. So a dit or dot give it as
one unit almost like music, okay, and a dash is
three units, so dot and then a dashes got it
(24:10):
for lack of a better vocal que. The space between
parts of the same letter would be one unit, so
there's one dits space between these dits and these DAWs,
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 S O S, you would
(24:33):
have that dit dit and then a space for the
span of three other dits. So people would say, Okay,
that's stopped, that's an S and then what was that?
Why On telegrams they say stop now, I'm sorry, keep going.
But the the the space between words would be seven units,
(24:54):
so they're they're counting not just the dits or the DAWs,
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. I see. And also
I'm looking at this chart of the alphabet and the
number system one through ten or one through nine and zero.
(25:17):
It's a little easier than you might think. A is dit,
D B is dot dit C is do dit? I
like saying don did it's fun D is dot E
is just one dit F is dit And going back
to your question, why is it not a dit for
one for two for three, I feel like it beats
(25:38):
about to drop, but one is actually did da da
da da seems long for one? It does? And what
we're talking about right now, this this code that we're
reading back to you is what became known as International
Morris Code and it was adopted by the international community
because incorporated the Latin alphabet with some extra Latin letters
(25:59):
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 Morris created that kind of took
hold and got adopted by the international community. It was
(26:21):
this International Morse Code that was developed by Frederick Clemens Girk,
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. Yeah, so
ten years after that first telegraph line opens in eighty four,
(26:45):
there were over twenty three thousand miles of line or
wire crossing the continent, and it hit a watershed moment
as various businesses that required quick long distance communication gandy
use telegraph systems. Railroad companies were one of the first
to the plate there they would use it to communicate
(27:06):
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 the code used in Europe
was called Continental Morse. And so that's when that's when
(27:29):
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 eighteen nineties, right, and radio frequencies got
(27:50):
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. And as technology
tends to do, it was subsumed by the next best thing,
(28:10):
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.
That was adopted by the military for communicating between you know,
planes and such. And even though uh like, for example,
amateur radio enthusiasts still use Morse code, it's a little
(28:34):
bit more of kind of a quirky holdover from the past.
I believe, Ben, you were telling me that the that
pilots UM and military personnel UM had to learn Morse
code up until I think the nineties, right, Yeah, up
until the nine nineties, pilots were required to know how
to communicate using Morse code, and up until two thousand
(28:54):
and seven, if you wanted to get an amateur radio license,
you had to pass a Morse Code proficient agency tests.
But you're right, the average person today is probably not
going to communicate 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
(29:15):
that I promptly forgot it after getting whatever merit badge
I was. 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 uh, one
group of people who are keeping it alive might surprise you, sure,
(29:36):
amateur radio operators. I feel like that's that's an easy one.
Civil war reenactors, Civil war reenactors keep American morse code alive.
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 morrise code visually through flashes of light
and at sea, uh, to communicate between ships or for
(30:00):
a ship to communicate with shore. They have these lamps
that have shutters on them. They can flash codes to uh,
you know, to the shore's You can actually get messages
back to shore by line of sight, and military personnel
POWs have used morse code through blinking to communicate the
true nature their situation and prospaganda videos. It's got all
(30:21):
kinds of uses. Still, not to mention young lads banging
on tree stumps in the forest. Yes, yes, yes, it's
a huge industry nowadays. And that's our story there. 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 Morris because so many people were
(30:44):
working on something similar. However, his personal mission, his passion
to UH to save other people from the situation that
he himself encountered, played a huge role in the timing
of Morse code. For it to be come a thing
when it did. It may have taken a little bit
longer had one man not been so emotionally impersonally driven
(31:08):
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 ever existed. I mean,
certainly like one of the earliest forms of long distance
communication UH that served as the basis for It's just
like the spark of an idea. It's like, hey, what
(31:29):
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 a media of any kind is.
It's all a jumping off from that simple idea. One
day we should tell the story of Farnsworth, the inventor
of television. You know, he got that idea when he
was a fourteen year old farm hand. Well story for
(31:52):
another day, and we've got to say, maybe we should
go back re record this entire episode in morse own.
What do you think? Yeah, I don't know about that.
I'll think it over. Let us know your thoughts on
Worse Code. Feel free to write to us in Worse
Code if you wish. You can find us on Facebook.
(32:12):
You can find us on almost said Amazon. I don't
know if you can find us in Amazon, but we're
definitely on Twitter, and you can find us collectively and
individually on Instagram. I am at Ben Boland, I am
at Embryonic Insider. You can check out our community page
on Facebook. There Ridiculous Historians, where you can drop your
history memes and hang out with your fellow podcast fans enthusiasts.
(32:34):
And check us out next time when we explore the
weird story of how a stray dog caused a war.
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 Casey face T
shirt again. But now the more I say the phrase,
(32:54):
the more I'm feeling it. So I don't know if
this puts us on opposite sides of history, but I
hope we were main friends. We'll see you ends up
on the right side of history thanks to Alex Williams
who composed our theme, and it's always on the right
side of history and the right side of our hearts,
along with Gabe, our research associates, and you Ben, and
to you as well, Noll and you know what to
you Samuel Morris, cheerio,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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