What is the Morse code for “A”?
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36 questions · Technology
How do you actually write SOS? Here you learn to translate every character into dots and dashes: the secret language of radio operators and ship captains, this time from letter to code. Morse code was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the 1830s and 40s for electric telegraphy. Its clever core is that frequent letters get short codes and rare ones long codes: E is a single dot, A is short-long (di-dah), B is dah-di-di-dit, and C alternates long-short-long-short in a rhythm you can almost dance to. Supposedly Vail counted the letters in a printer's type case to find out which ones appear most often: making Morse an early ancestor of data compression. Before voice radio existed, this was for decades the fastest way to send news across continents. The abbreviations of that era survive to this day: CQ is the general call to all stations, and CQD was the distress signal before SOS. Did you know that D is dah-di-dit: exactly the mirror image of U? Spotting such pairs makes learning the alphabet much easier.
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