How did Morse code machines connect and send electromagnetic pulses over long distances?

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They aren’t connected via a very long wire, are they?

P.S I’d like to understand the physics behind it, not how Morse code works.

In: Technology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s no such thing as a “morse code machine”. Morse code is just how information is encoded in the transmission. What you’re asking about is telegraphy. Up until around 1910, telegraphy absolutely did use long wires, just like landline phones. Around that time, wireless telegraphy was invented, that used radio waves to transmit signals, much like a walkie talkie or mobile phone.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They did have long wires, yes. You had long telegraph wires that would eventually span the entire globe. The longest ones were crossing the atlantic. Before the telegraph system there were the semaphore system which used a system with two flags waved in different positions. There were big semaphore towers that could be seen for miles using big mechanical arms to spell out the letters. This system allowed people to send messages fast across the country and even to some degree around the world. But with the electricity and the telegraph system that used the morse codes or other types of codes message speed would increase from minutes to seconds. It should be noted that most people did not have a telegraph station at home. There were usually just one telegraph station in each city and messages might have needed to be relayed through several of these telegraph stations as most did not have a direct connection to each other. So you would normally write a short telegraph, send it with a runner to the nearest telegraph station, they would pass it along the wire until it reached the city you were sending the telegram to, and then it would get written down and sent by a runner to the destination.

Telegrams did also use wireless technology where it was required. First they used similar systems of visible communication that the semaphore system did but with shutters that opened and closed in front of a spotlight or just a piece of canvas. This was mostly used on ships but it did also transition to airplanes and tanks. Some of the last such systems were deployed in tanks during WWII. When radio was invented it was natural for ships to switch to radiotelegraph. However as frequencies had not been discovered they were all sending on top of each other. Part of the problem for Titanic was that their passengers sent so many telegrams that it prevented the captains in the entire North Atlantic from sending weather reports and ice reports to each other and the ship closest to the Titanic and actually able to rescue them even turned off their radio and went to sleep because of the noise of all the telegrams going from the Titanic to land meaning they never received the CQD/SOS distress messages.

As telephones were invented and became more common a lot of the old telegraph wires were converted to phone wires. And as digital communication was invented those were eventually replaced with fiber optic lines. However most of them still takes the same routes as the old telegraph wires. That includes the transatlantic wires which still to this day uses the same beaches.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Depending on era and location, it was both radio and wired, such as the *Transatlantic* Telegraph Cable

Anonymous 0 Comments

It was literally done with wires. Back in the day, sending a telegram was called ‘sending a wire’ and when radio came in it was known as ‘wireless telegraphy.’ If you look at pictures of old time steam trains there’s almost always a telegraph wire running next to the train tracks.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Morse code is not a machine as such, but a type of language or code. It is a way to convert a written or spoken message into a signal that can be sent by anything that can send an on/off message – this could be a light flashing on and off, a buzzer turning on and off or anything similar that someone can easily tell if it is on or off.

What you are probably thinking of as a Morse code machine is the early telegraph system – this was a way of transmitting a signal in Morse code electrically down a wire, and was as simple as having a button on one end of a wire connected to a small buzzer at the other end – when the operator presses the button the person receiving the message at the other end hears a buzz or tone. By tapping the button with long and short presses you can send a signal in Morse code which the person receiving the message can hear and decode.

Because the early systems were as simple as a button and buzzer being connected together, you did need to have a continuous piece of wire running between the sender and receiver to carry the signal.
These wires were the initial part of our telephone system, creating a huge network of phone lines that could be connected together in such a way as to physically connect together a phone at each end to let them talk to each other.

Morse code was invented long before wireless communication, but when the early radio sets were developed, Morse code was often used to transmit signals as it is simple to use and very clear (assuming you know how to decode the most code signal into letters) – more complicated signals like the human voice were much more prone to getting interference and being much harder to hear at the other end.