MORSE CODE HISTORY

THE FATHER OF MORSE CODE MR MORSE

Samuel F.B. Morse by Mathew Brady Studio, Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative

When a scarcity of commissions led Samuel Morse to reconsider his career as an artist, he turned from painting to pursue his earlier interest in inventing. In 1832, he conceived a plan for an electromagnetic recording telegraph and dedicated his energies to developing a working model for his invention. When he applied for a patent in 1840, Morse had succeeded in devising a relay system for transmitting messages over long distances and had created the practical transmission code that bears his name. For a time, lack of capital imperiled the future of his telegraph, but in 1843 Congress funded the construction of an experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. One year later, Morse ushered in a new age in communications when he tapped out the first message, "What hath God wrought!" 

MR SAMUEL F B MORSE
In 1825, the city of New York commissioned Morse for $1,000 to paint a portrait of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, in Washington. In the midst of painting, a horse messenger delivered a letter from his father that read one line, "Your wife is dead". Morse immediately left Washington for his home at New Haven, leaving the portrait of Lafayette unfinished. By the time he arrived she had already been buried.[4] Heartbroken in the knowledge that for days he was unaware of his wife's failing health and her lonely death, he moved on from painting to pursue a means of rapid long distance communication.[5]On the sea voyage home in 1832, Morse encountered Charles Thomas Jackson of Boston who was well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson's electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph, and The Gallery of the Louvre was set aside. The original Morse telegraph, submitted with his patent application, is part of the collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.[6] In time the Morse code would become the primary language of telegraphy in the world, and is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.William Cooke and Professor Charles Wheatstone reached the stage of launching a commercial telegraph prior to Morse, despite starting later. In England, Cooke became fascinated by electrical telegraph in 1836, four years after Morse, but with greater financial resources. Cooke abandoned his primary subject of anatomy and built a small electrical telegraph within three weeks. Wheatstone also was experimenting with telegraphy and (most importantly) understood that a single large battery would not carry a telegraphic signal over long distances, and that numerous small batteries were far more successful and efficient in this task (Wheatstone was building on the primary research of Joseph Henry, an American physicist). Cooke and Wheatstone formed a partnership and patented the electrical telegraph in May 1837, and within a short time had provided the Great Western Railway with a 13-mile (21 km) stretch of telegraph. However, Cooke and Wheatstone's multiple wire signaling method would be overtaken by Morse's superior method within a few years.In a letter to a friend, Morse describes the challenge of defending his patent on the electromagnetic telegraph.[1] (1848).[7]I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would you have believed it ten years ago that a question could be raised on that subject?Morse encountered the problem of getting a telegraphic signal to carry over more than a few hundred yards of wire. His breakthrough came from the insights of Professor Leonard Gale, who taught chemistry at New York University (a personal friend of Joseph Henry). With Gale's help, Morse soon was able to send a message through ten miles (16 km) of wire. This was the great breakthrough Morse had been seeking. Morse and Gale were soon joined by a young enthusiastic man, Alfred Vail, who had excellent skills, insights and money. Morse's telegraph now began to be developed very rapidly.In 1838 a trip to Washington, D.C., failed to attract federal sponsorship for a telegraph line. Morse then traveled to Europe seeking both sponsorship and patents, but in London discovered Cooke and Wheatstone had already established priority. Morse would need the financial backing of Maine congressman Francis Ormand Jonathan Smith.Morse made one last trip to Washington, D.C., in December 1842, stringing "wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol, and sent messages back and forth" to demonstrate his telegraph system.³ Congress appropriated $30,000 in 1843 for construction of an experimental 38-mile (61 km) telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, along the right-of-way of theBaltimore and Ohio Railroad.[8] An impressive demonstration occurred on May 1, 1844, when news of the Whig Party's nomination of Henry Clay for U.S. President was telegraphed from the party's convention in Baltimore to the Capitol Building in Washington.[8]. On May 24, 1844, the line was officially opened as Morse sent the famous words "What hath God wrought" from the B&O's Mount Clare Station in Baltimore to the Capitol Building along the wire.[8] These words were taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23) and were selected by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner.The first telegraph officeIn May 1845 the Magnetic Telegraph Company was formed in order to radiate telegraph lines from New York City towards Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, New York and the Mississippi.4Morse also at one time adopted Wheatstone and Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting an electrical telegraph signal through a body of water or down steel railroad tracks or anything conductive. He went to great lengths to win a lawsuit for the right to be called "inventor of the telegraph", and promoted himself as being an inventor, but Alfred Vail played an important role in the invention of the Morse Code, which was based on earlier codes for the electromagnetic telegraph.Samuel Morse received a patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace (the present Beylerbeyi Palace was built in 1861–1865 on the same location) in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid who personally tested the new invention.[9] 5In the 1850s, Morse went to Copenhagen and visited the Thorvaldsens Museum, where the sculptor's grave is in the inner courtyard. He was received by King Frederick VII, who decorated him with the Order of the Dannebrog. Morse expressed his wish to donate his portrait from 1830 to the king. The Thorvaldsen portrait today belongs to Margaret II of Denmark.The Morse telegraphic apparatus was officially adopted as the standard for European telegraphy in 1851. Britain (with its British Empire) remained the only notable part of the world where other forms of electrical telegraph were in widespread use (they continued to use the needle telegraph invention of Cooke and Wheatstone).[10]There is an argument amongst historians that Morse may have received the idea of a plausible telegraph from Harrison Gray Dyar some eighteen years earlier than his patent.[11]According to his The New York Times obiturary published on April 3, 1872, Morse received respectively the decoration of the Atiq Nishan-i-Iftikhar (English: Order of Glory) [first medal on wearer's right depicted in photo of Morse with medals], set in diamonds, from the Sultan Ahmad I ibn Mustafa of Turkey, a golden snuff box containing the Prussian gold medal for scientific merit from the King of Prussia (1851); the Great Gold Medal of Arts and Sciences from the King of Württemberg (1852); and the Great Golden Medal of Science and Arts from Emperor of Austria (1855); a cross of Chevalier in the Légion d'honneur from the Emperor of France; the Cross of a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog from the King of Denmark (1856); the Cross of Knight Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, from the Queen of Spain, besides being elected member of innumerable scientific and art societies in this [United States] and other countries. Other awards include Order of the Tower and Sword from the kingdom of Portugal (1860); and Italy conferred on him the insignia of chevalier of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus in 1864

MORSE CODE KEY

MORSE CODE COMICS

Some geeky morse code comics.

TRIGRAM FOR HEAVEN

U+2630   Trigram for Heaven

The wisdom of the Yi-King of origin lies in the 3rd Millennium before Christ. Emperor Fou-Hsi is about 2800 BC oral wisdom of a system of signs are fixed. 
The wisdom of the Yi-King was the game used yarrow, a game with whole and broken fingers, the best of magicians and priests to prayer and oracles purposes was used. The figure of the rods took place in the Yi-King-type one by a whole line of "yang" (male) and a broken line for "yin" (female). From these two basic elements, the actual number collected, and eight trigrams or elementary characters. In these eight main characters are the basic elements of the world on an almost figurative manner.
The system on this building Hexagramme can be found in the Unicode block U +4 DC0 - U +4 DFF Yijing Hexagram Symbols.

SIGNIFICANCE 

Kiên The sign consists of three Yang lines and is the strongest of the eight trigrams. Its meaning is identical with that of YANG: It stands for creativity, the creative and original in all things of the cosmos. The sign is a harbinger for the achievement of harmony, happiness and success. Other attributes: 


PROPERTIES 
Strength, harmony, perseverance, energy 

IMAGE 
Sky 

FAMILY 
Father 

BODY PART 
Head (mind) 

DIRECTION OF HEAVEN 
South (after Fu Hi) 

SEASON 
Summer (after Fu Hi)

U+2631 TRIGRAM FOR LAKE

UNICODE-MORSE

UNICODE ARTICLE FROM EYE MAGAZINE

The United Nations of Type



Unicode is one of the great success stories of standardisation. The Unicode Consortium is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1991 by all the major computer companies (including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe) and its mission is to ensure consistency in the digital encoding of typographic characters. 

In the original Unicode, each character had an unambiguously defined sixteen-bit code point. Updates to Unicode have made available seventeen ‘planes’ of 65,536 points, potentially 1,114,112 different characters, minus several thousand ‘function’ codes. The current version (Unicode 5.0) has the potential to encode all the characters in all the world’s languages, living or dead, realising the dream of Xerox Parc’s Joseph D. Becker that ‘the ultimate goal must be multi-lingual word processing.’

Decodeunicode is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to ‘decode’ and demystify Unicode, and to proselytise independently on its behalf. The project was launched in 2004 by the design department at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, where Johannes Bergerhausen is professor of typography, and went online in 2005 as www.decodeunicode.org. It was initially supported by a grant from the German federal government, but is now self-supporting, raising revenue from the sale of graphic materials such as postcards and a giant, limited-edition poster. The website has won many awards including: 100 Beste Plakate, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, 2004; iF Gold Award, 2005; iF Gold Award 2006; Red Dot Best of the Best, 2006, plus a nomination for the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2007.

Bergerhausen, originally from Bonn, studied communication design in Düsseldorf and lived and worked in Paris for much of the 1990s. He collaborated with Grapus founders, Gérard Paris-Clavel (see Eye no. 27 vol. 7) at Ne Pas Plier and Pierre Bernard (Eye no. 3 vol. 1) at Atelier de Création Graphique before founding his own practice. He conducted a French-funded research project on ASCII in 1998, and returned to Germany in 2000, taking up the Mainz post in 2002. For a while, Decodeunicode was a full time job for Bergerhausen, but it now takes up about 20 per cent of his working time.

This interview, conducted mainly by email, took place while Professor Bergerhausen was based temporarily in Paris (for research work), and ‘on the road’, lecturing in Bologna, Amiens and Mainz. He has also delivered lectures about Decodeunicode in Beirut, Berlin, Dubai, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Prague, Rotterdam, San Francisco and Weimar. 

His team is currently working to integrate all Unicode characters, including ancient and minority scripts from the other Unicode planes such as Cuneiform and Byzantine musical symbols, making more than 99,000 characters.

John L. Walters 
Is Decodeunicode just for designers and typographers? Or is it for everyone?

Johannes Bergerhausen 
Our project is, on the one hand, directed at experts, e.g. designers, typographers, linguists or programmers. On the other hand, we also receive feedback from a lay public who simply derives pleasure from the character shapes in languages such as Arabic or Ethiopic. Our website aims to provide a popular scientific access to the writing systems of the world. 

Why you, Johannes Bergerhausen?

I felt that one of the most important revolutions in typography should not happen unnoticed by the public – it has been a kind of idée fixe for me. Anyone with a PC or Mac has access to more characters than Gutenberg ever did. Every time I present the project I feel I am showing people a bizarre, fascinating and completely unknown universe. The people at the Unicode Consortium are doing a very good job, but they don’t communicate to a general public. And they find it hard to make people understand that it is not a question of simply assigning code points to a couple of characters, and that the technical process of implementation is very complicated. 

And of course I am not alone. The number of people in our team today varies between three and five, online; as many as 180 contributors have helped, and students on the planned Master’s course at Mainz will be joining.

Can Decodeunicode change people and behaviour and things?

Unicode has already changed the way business people think of type. A corporate font for a modern international organisation can no longer stick to Latin characters alone. Addressing large and small markets in their national language, in their local script, has become much easier, and even saves money. The Decodeunicode project makes a small contribution to this by drawing attention to the subject, and what remains to be done. Since the implementation of Unicode and OpenType, the type design community has shown an increased interest in ‘exotic’ writing systems. More non-Latin fonts than ever are being created. 

When did you first become aware of the political and social aspects of typography and design? 

It was when I discovered that the ISO-Latin1 code of the 1980s was like something from the Cold War: special characters like the German umlaut, French cedilla or the Spanish tilde are encoded – but try writing a name like Miloševi´c!

Has there been any opposition to Unicode?

The greatest danger lies in the possibility of the computer industry losing interest in encoding missing writing systems, assuming the markets they represent are too small. About 30 living minority scripts have yet to be encoded. Though some of them represent communities of no more than 100,000 people, they, too, provide a market. As yet, none of the leading operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) supplies enough fonts to cover all the Unicode characters. 

Furthermore, there are keyboard layouts missing. At the very least, operating systems should be localised for every large language community. Take, for example, Cambodia with its thirteen million population. That’s some market!

But some markets will always be smaller than others. Are you not making a point about democracy and equality here, too? 

Yes, I am. Apart from the existing social responsibility of the designer there is a social responsibility of the big global brands such as Apple, Microsoft or Nokia to support access of minority communities to the it world. To attain this goal might well become easier in the future, with a growing number of tools being equipped with input devices operating through soft buttons instead of hard buttons, like the iPhone or the Optimus keyboard developed by the Russian industrial designer Art Lebedev. 
The so-called ‘other planes’ include many characters, such as Cuneiform or Old Italic, that are used by only a small number of communities. Some software developers see no sense in developing fonts for them. To give an example, in order to save storage space, mobile phones offer only the 10,000 most important Chinese characters as a font. But we need to think beyond that. The storage space of a mobile phone today equals that of a computer two decades ago. In a few years, including everything will be no problem. Every operating system should then at least offer a default font for each character.

You refer to Unicode as a sort of ‘typographical UN General Assembly’. Is the Consortium similarly unwieldy and complex?

Yes, and you could take the simile further: international organisations are slow. It may take a couple of years for a proposal to include a new character to pass (or be rejected). After which one has to wait for the next update of operating systems. We are actually talking about a democratisation of characters, regardless of the tools on which (or countries in which) they are to be used in the future. This is a one-off process humanity must undertake. The Unicode Consortium adheres to a few ‘basic laws’ such as, for example, never changing a character’s name, even if incorrect, so as not to corrupt the data. However dictatorially inclined designers may be, I cannot imagine any breakaways.

You describe ASCII as ‘one of the most successful codes’ since DNA. How and why did things go wrong in the early 1980s with eight-bit codes such as ISO-Latin1 and Windows?

In the 1980s, every manufacturer produced their own code chart – they didn’t think of a common standard. Everyone thought their own system was the best, and nobody had in mind the exchange of characters via the internet. It was an evolutionary process like Blue-Ray (DVD) and HD-DVD today.

Evolution can be a slow and inefficient process. How did universal encoding come about?

Xerox’s Star workstation, which was developed in 1980, not only featured the first commercial graphical user interface with windows, icons and mouse but also a sixteen-bit universal code including Asian characters, which may be regarded as a predecessor of Unicode. Joseph D. Becker published the first paper on universal coding in 1988, after discussions between two members of the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) staff and one Apple employee. 
In 1991, Unicode 1.0.0 was published. The breakthrough came with the support of Unicode by Windows NT in 1993 and XML in 1998. The internet speaks Unicode.

Why is it important that Unicode encodes dead languages? Is it just because we can?

At present researchers can only have images of texts in archaic characters – they can’t use full text search. They would like to work with these characters in PDFs, presentation documents and emails, too. With Aramaic characters in one of the next Unicode updates, we can expect interesting results in a few years from Bible scholars analysing the Dead Sea scrolls. 

Will Unicode ever embrace non-alphabetic symbols, such as pictograms and dingbats? Or dance notation, such as Labanotation?

This is one of the fascinating questions for the future of Unicode: what to do about special characters such as astronomical signs, laundry symbols, dingbats, etc. The American linguist Deborah Anderson, the German typographer and researcher Andreas Stötzner and I filed an initial proposal for a new Unicode block called ‘Public Signage’ last year. Western musical symbols and even Byzantine and ancient Greek musical symbols are already encoded. 
Any community wishing to use Labanotation or any other writing system is free to file a proposal with the Unicode Consortium.

In 2004 you made a plea for ‘typographers, linguists and other experts to join in the finalising of the work’. Has this been heeded?

It has, even though we still have a long way to go. Few linguists, apart from Unicode’s Irish co-author Michael Everson, are aware of the problems of dealing with letterforms. Deborah Anderson’s ‘Script Encoding Initiative’ fights for the inclusion of minority scripts. 

We are also working on an update to integrate the lesser-known characters of the Unicode standard (the ‘other planes’). Only a small number of our 60,000 unique monthly visitors actually contribute information. It is my hope that the site will become one of the references for information about Unicode characters. It has many good contributions in German, but we need more contributions in English! 

Every writer (on a computer or mobile device) is now a typesetter. Do ordinary people realise this? 

Some of them do. At least, they ought to be able to tell the apostrophe from the minute character. I think that dictionaries, in their description of special characters (such as the different dashes: - – — ) should give the corresponding Unicode positions (for example, ‘U+2015 horizontal bar’) as these make up the only hardware- and software-independent information.

Do designers care about Decodeunicode? 

Yes. Interest in this strange subject does apparently exist! In 2005, the website counted a monthly average of 11,000 visitors. In 2006, it was 33,000, and in the first four months of 2007, it was more than 65,000 people from 133 countries, making two million page impressions per month. The second edition of our poster sold most of its 600 copies within two months. We have just finished another poster, showing all the characters of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of Unicode 5.0, and folded as a map. This is much easier to handle, and we have printed 3000. All profits go to the advancement of the project.

Who else is supporting the cause? 

There are many people working on advancing Unicode. First of all, there is the Unicode community working on proposals to encode new scripts or missing single characters. International working groups meet twice a year somewhere on the planet. There are proposals to include Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

Type designers are aware of Unicode, but only a few people, like Andreas Stötzner, are taking the time to work on proposals to include new characters. He is currently setting up proposals on medieval Latin characters and recently re-filed a proposal to include the disputed German Versal-Eszett (uppercase ß).

But do enough people know about it?

There is not enough feedback from the academic world. Possibly, it has yet to realise that, once encoded in Unicode, a character becomes available ‘in the public domain’. (The German Grüner Punkt refused to have its ‘green dot’ packaging recycling symbol included in Unicode. In trying to protect its intellectual property, it missed an opportunity to make its sign accessible and known all over the world.)

Erik Spiekermann said to me that ‘the only thing better than the website is the poster’. Did it take long to make?

One day, our database designer, Wenzel Spingler, sent us a text file in which, with the help of a script, he had lined up one character after the next — 65,536 code positions! We felt it would be interesting, fun and useful to get a simple overview of the sheer number of characters, following the tradition of scientific tables. It took some weeks for Siri Poarangan and me to design it, six months for the tutors to implement the nineteen different fonts, several weeks to design missing characters and a month for Siri and me to proof it. It is just one text frame in InDesign. But if you change one letter, you have to wait for several minutes for the computer to operate, like on my first Mac lc in 1990.

Has Decodeunicode had an impact on your practice as a designer and educator?

Looking beyond their own Latin alphabet can be useful for designers, typographers and students alike, as it leads to many questions about the theory of design. Unicode differentiates between character and glyph, i.e. between the Platonic idea of a character and the actual shape it takes. You can call it the difference between form and content, or the distinction that von Ehrenfels draws between the ideas of Gehalt and Gestalt.

Could you imagine ‘Unicode the movie’? Is there enough sex and violence to get funding?

Oh! How did you know? We are actually thinking about it . . . But don’t tell anyone!

Morse Code (-- --- •-• ••• • -•-• --- -•• •)

Origin

Morse Code was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), a painter and founder of the National Academy of Design. He conceived the basic idea of an electromagnetic telegraph in 1832, and produced the first working telegraph set in 1836. This made transmission possible over any distance. The first Morse Code message, "What hath God wrought?", was sent from Washington to Baltimore.

Today experienced operators copy received text without the need to write as they receive, and when transmitting, can easily converse at 20 to 30 words per minute. Morse Code will always remain a viable means of providing highly reliable communications during difficult communications conditions.

Morse Code can be transmitted using sound or light, as sometimes happens between ships at sea. It is used in emergencies to transmit distress signals when no other form of communication is available. The standard international distress signal is •••---••• (SOS)

Since December 2003, Morse Code has included the @ symbol: it is a combination of a and c: •--•-• and is the first change to the system since before World War II.