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Originally Posted by PTTG
I believe the assumption was that it would be filled mainly by seawater due to some combination of the disastrous canal project and altered geography.
Samuel F.B. Morse was insanely racist and sectarian, even for his time. It's easy to imagine him being distracted or discredited by his intolerance and never developing his famous code.
There's two ways to take this, which might have interesting secondary effects.
1: Morse code became popular mainly because it was better than the alternatives at the time. In which case, telegraph and wireless signals are a mishmash of encryption schemes fairly continuously to the present day. Since a good code is a remarkably effective competitive advantage, telecommunications companies would defend them, and in turn legal protection for encryption would become a major turning point.
2: Morse code became popular mainly because of the need for standardization. In which case, a different code would likely fill the place, and that code might be better in some way; perhaps faster, or easier to decrypt. Or more redundant. Any one of those could change the way that some emergency messages are received.
In either case, you could jump forward some centuries and say that butterfly effects cause the Titanic to receive warning about the icebergs, to pick a random example.
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Right about my flooding assumptions. Interesting idea about Morse.
The problem with the Titanic wasn't that it didn't recieve the messages. They did recieve the warnings. They just were required to go through the backlog of business and social messages for the first class passengers first. Priorities were messed up and lives lost.