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Western Union announces the end of its telegram service

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by hb06, Jan 26, 2007.

  1. hb06

    hb06 Member

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    "Western Union announces the end of its telegram service. Once God wrought e-mail, the era of the telegram -- already in decline -- was doomed."

    "Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse Code, sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore on May 26, 1844, to his partner Alfred Vail to usher in the telegram era that displaced the Pony Express. It read “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11147506/
     
  2. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    The code invented by Samuel Morse is not the code commonly (and erroniously) refered to as the Morse code. Sam's code, commonly distinguished by calling it "American Morse code" was used on the old land-line telegraph, before it was replaced by telephone, teletype, telefax, and eventually computers.

    The code we commonly call Morse code is the International Morse code, used by radiotelegraphers, including amateur radio operators. As far as I know, it has been used nowhere except amateur radio for a very long time.

    Sam's code was used with clackers, where the international code is used by sending beeps. Sam's code included both long and short dashes, as well as dots, and slightly longer spaces within some of the letters. The international code is more uniform, with only dots and dashes, and where spaces within letters are (when properly formed) all of the same length, and shorter than the spaces between letters or words.

    I don't know if any of these guys are still around, a couple of decades after I hung up my code key, but back then you'd occasionally hear a couple of old landline telegraphers using the landline (American Morse) code on the amateur bands and it was a really weird feeling, because you thought you should be able to read it, but you couldn't make any sense out of it at all. Enough of the letters are the same that you hear some letters, but enough are different that what you hear is gibberish, and a few of the letters are not even letters.

    Samuel Morse was a great man, but the international code was a big improvement over his code.
     
  3. onerpm

    onerpm New Member

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    did the announcement simply say "stop?"