As a result of listening to a TV broadcast, about two months ago, on the subject of discontinuing the use of Morse Code in the Merchant Navy, I thought I thought I would like to contribute an article on this subject. As the title of this article suggests, it is a big question on the future of the Morse Code in the Merchant Navy. Only two months ago I watched an American TV Broadcast which stated that the Morse Code will be discontinued as a means of communication by the Merchant Navy at sea. Whether or not this applies only to American Ships is left to be seen. No mention was made whether any International agreement was reached for the discontinuing of Morse as a means of communications at sea. For over Nine years I served as a radio officer in the British Merchant Navy with P&O Lines and with the New Zealand Shipping Company. The use of Morse was absolutely essential in communication with other ships of foreign nations and with their coast stations, and using the "Q" code it may of communication so easy to understand. The use of CW provides the most penetrating signal, it penetrates where voice transmission cannot do as well. Morse and international "Q" code is essential for the use of Direction Finding, position of ships at sea and weather forecasts from area coast stations around the world including important messages to direct the course of ships at sea. Above all, CW with Morse, is the most penetrating signal, given any weather condition, transmitted by ships during distress conditions at sea. Personally I think Morse is so essential for use by Ham Radio operators - nothing can be more exciting by listening to some very distant Morse signal transmitted by some foreign country at the opposite end of the earth. This is where the ‘Q’ code comes into play. I feel the present day technology, with all its advantages, cannot replace Morse, which is, really, our second language. Reg Tustain VE3NEF Editors note: End of road
for Morse Code's dots and dashes LONDON, Feb 1 - Morse Code, which spelt out the demise of the Titanic and the end of two World Wars, on Monday fell victim to the relentless march of technology. For those in peril on the sea, three dots, three dashes and three dots once spelt out SOS -- the universally recognised call sign for a ship in distress. Now Morse is being replaced by a satellite-based "Mayday" system on all ships over 300 tonnes which have to carry satellite and radio equipment for sending and receiving distress alerts. "Morse is a system that has played an incalculable part in the development of trade and history itself -- but it has now died of old age," said Roger Cohn of the International Maritime Organisation. It was invented in 1832 -- appropriately enough on a Transatlantic sea crossing -- by Massachusetts portrait painter Samuel Morse. His system, the 19th century precursor of the Internet, was hailed as in its heyday as "the instantaneous highway of thought." By the time of his death in 1872, the world boasted 650,000 miles (one million km) of telegraph lines on land and 30,000 miles of submarine cable. With Marconi's invention of the wireless, Morse Code was given a new lease of life. In 1899, the first shipwreck was reported by Morse Code in the English Channel. By 1910, Morse had even trapped its first murderer when the notorious British killer Dr Crippen was trapped. A message was tapped out to the liner Montrose on which he was trying to escape to Canada with his mistress. Tragedy struck in 1912 when the fateful message "SOS. Come at once. We have struck berg" was tapped out by the Titanic. Hundreds of lives could have been saved by the liner California, just miles away. But its radio operator was not on duty and never heard the message. From then on, all ships maintained a 24-hour radio watch. The radio telegraph station in Isahaya, Japan closed on Sunday after more than 90 years of operation. And Scottish coastguards, who picked up a Morse Code message from a listing cargo ship last month, confessed they were so surprised that they thought it was a joke. The London Times, reflecting nostalgically on the 19th century answer to e-mail, said in an editorial on Monday: "Morse broadcast the ceasefires of both World Wars. It was used by generals and spies, speculators, journalists and prisoners communicating with the next cell." And then it concluded sadly..."Over and Out."
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.. .--. (SOS, RIP) "Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence." Surprisingly this message, which flashed over the airwaves in the dots and dashes of Morse code on January 31st 1997, was not a desperate transmission by a radio operator on a sinking ship. Rather, it was a message signalling the end of the use of Morse code for distress calls in French waters. Since 1992 countries around the world have been decommissioning their Morse equipment with similar (if less poetic) sign-offs, as the world's shipping switches over to a new satellite- based arrangement, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. The final deadline for the switch-over to GMDSS is February 1st, a date that is widely seen as the end of an era. For although dots and dashes will not die out altogether -- they will, for example, continue to be used by amateur radio operators, spies, and some members of the armed forces -- the switch to GMDSS marks the end of the last significant international use of Morse. The code has, however, had a good history. From its origins in 1832, when an American inventor called Samuel Morse first started scribbling in his notebook, it grew to become the global standard for sending messages along wires and, later, over the airwaves. Morse code was, in effect, the network protocol for the world's first Internet: the international telegraph network, whose cables trussed up the globe in the second half of the 19th century. The mother of all networks: Appropriately for a technology commonly associated with radio operators on sinking ships, the idea of Morse code is said to have occurred to Samuel Morse while he was on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. At the time Morse was a painter and occasional inventor, but when another of the ship's passengers informed him of recent advances in electrical theory, Morse was suddenly taken with the idea of building an electric telegraph. Other inventors had been trying to do just that for the best part of a century. Morse succeeded and is now remembered as "the father of the telegraph" partly thanks to his singlemindedness -- it was 12 years, for example, before he secured money from Congress to build his first telegraph line -- but also for technical reasons. Compared with rival electric telegraph designs, such as the needle telegraph developed by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, Morse's design was very simple: it required little more than a "key" (essentially, a spring-loaded switch) to send messages, a clicking "sounder" to receive them, and a wire to link the two. But although Morse's hardware was simple, there was a catch: in order to use his equipment, operators had to learn the special code of dots and dashes that still bears his name. Originally, Morse had not intended to use combinations of dots and dashes to represent individual letters. His first code, sketched in his notebook during that transatlantic voyage, used dots and dashes to represent the digits 0 to 9. Morse's idea was that messages would consist of strings of numbers corresponding to words and phrases in a special numbered dictionary. But Morse later abandoned this scheme and, with the help of an associate, Alfred Vail, devised the Morse alphabet, which could be used to spell out messages a letter at a time in dots and dashes. At first, the need to learn this complicated-looking code made Morse's telegraph seem impossibly tricky compared with other, more user-friendly designs. Cooke's and Wheatstone's telegraph, for example, used five needles to pick out letters on a diamond-shaped grid. But although this meant that anyone could use it, it also required five wires between telegraph stations. Morse's telegraph needed only one. And some people, it soon transpired, had a natural facility for Morse code. As electric telegraphy took off in the early 1850s, the Morse telegraph quickly became dominant. It was adopted as the European standard in 1851, allowing direct connections between the telegraph networks of different countries. (Britain chose not to participate, sticking with needle telegraphs for a few more years.) By this time Morse code had been revised to allow for accents and other foreign characters, resulting in a split between American and International Morse that continues to this day. On international submarine cables, left and right swings of a light-beam reflected from a tiny rotating mirror were used to represent dots and dashes. Meanwhile a distinct telegraphic subculture was emerging, with its own customs and vocabulary, and a hierarchy based on the speed at which operators could send and receive Morse code. First-class operators, who could send and receive at speeds of up to 45 words a minute, handled press traffic, securing the best-paid jobs in big cities. At the bottom of the pile were slow, inexperienced rural operators, many of whom worked the wires as part-timers. As their Morse code improved, however, rural operators found that their new-found skill was a passport to better pay in a city job. Telegraphers soon swelled the ranks of the emerging middle classes. Telegraphy was also deemed suitable work for women. By 1870, a third of the operators in the Western Union office in New York, the largest telegraph office in America, were female. Just as skilled operators found that they could recognise each other over the wires from their style of Morse code, many operators claimed to be able to recognise women operators. Inevitably, romances were initiated over the wires -- just as they are today by e-mail. There were even a handful of weddings by telegraph. In a dramatic ceremony in 1871, Morse himself said goodbye to the global community of telegraphers he had brought into being. After a lavish banquet and many adulatory speeches, Morse sat down behind an operator's table and, placing his finger on a key connected to every telegraph wire in America, tapped out his final farewell to a standing ovation. By the time of his death in 1872, the world was well and truly wired: more than 650,000 miles of telegraph line and 30,000 miles of submarine cable were throbbing with Morse code; and 20,000 towns and villages were connected to the global network. Just as the Internet is today often called an "information superhighway", the telegraph was described in its day as an "instantaneous highway of thought". But by the 1890s the Morse telegraph's heyday as a cutting-edge technology was coming to an end, with the invention of the telephone and the rise of automatic telegraphs, precursors of the teleprinter, neither of which required specialist skills to operate. Morse code, however, was about to be given a new lease of life thanks to another new technology: wireless. Following the invention of radiotelegraphy by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, its potential for use at sea quickly became apparent. For the first time, ships could communicate with each other, and with the shore, whatever the weather and even when out of visual range. In 1897 Marconi successfully sent Morse code messages between a shore station and an Italian warship 19km (12 miles) away. The first sea rescue after a distress call sent by radiotelegraph took place in 1899, when a lightship in the Dover Straits reported the grounding of Elbe, a steamship. Two years later, Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio signal: three dots, the letter "S" in Morse code. By 1910, Morse radio equipment was commonplace on ships. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912, however, highlighted the need for radio operators to listen at all times for distress signals. After the disaster it emerged that the liner Californian had been only a few miles away, and that hundreds of lives might have been saved had the Californian's radio operator been on duty and so able to receive the Titanic's "SOS" distress call. At the first International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), held in London in 1914, it was agreed that large vessels should maintain 24-hour radio watch. This rule has remained ever since, with subsequent SOLAS conventions gradually introducing new rules to keep pace with the development of technologies such as radiotelephony. The advent of satellite technology led the International Maritime Organisation to amend the SOLAS convention in 1988 to introduce GMDSS, an automated emergency communications system based on satellite and radio links. Optional since 1992, GMDSS equipment will be compulsory worldwide from February 1st on all ships that exceed 300 tonnes, carry 12 or more passengers, or travel in international waters. (Owners of smaller vessels can install the equipment if they wish.) Under GMDSS, anyone on board a ship in distress merely has to press a button to send a distress call containing the vessel's identification number and its precise location -- there is no need for a skilled Morse operator. And so, after nearly 170 years, Morse code will finally slip beneath the waves. Over and out:
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