Quote:
Originally Posted by PTTG
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.
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"Morse Code" as the term is normally understood isn't actually a *code*. It's a simple substitution cipher. It doesn't need decrypting, unless you consider reading something written in an alphabet to be "decrypted" into sounds.
There's really nothing particularly remarkable about it - there aren't a lot of options once you allow for a lossy enough line you are stuck with a binary (on/off) code scheme, and Morse probably isn't the optimum scheme in that space. But if you could count on everybody to get the timing right, to distinguish "zero, zero" or "one, one" from "I screwed up and hesitated on the key" you could use fixed length signals and send ASCII, or Unicode.
And finally, Morse didn't invent it - his idea actually *was* a sort of code - a system where you sent numbers to be looked up in a book to turn them into words. Somebody else thought of using the dots and dashes to send letters.