Morse code is made up of dots and dashes. How did telegraph operators keep from losing track of where one letter ended and another began?

Question

In the movies, morse code comes through so fast it’s hard to tell a dot from a dash. Hoe did they keep from getting lost?

In: 1001

Answer 1

Everyone else has answered your specific questions, but if you want to go deeper into the social conventions and culture that early Morse coders developed among themselves, there is a fascinating book, *The Victorian Internet*, which delves into those. It’s about 20 years old, so it predates “Web 2.0”, and social media, but it points out many fascinating parallels between Morse operators and early-internet chat rooms.

The gist is that between messages operators would talk amongst themselves, gossiping and becoming long-distance friends. People gained status by transmitting and receiving faster, or by doing so with especial elegance. They invented lots of private acronyms, and conventions to express personal messages, and sub-textual feelings. Romances developed across the wires. It was a whole, shared, nerdy, long-distance world, the first to exist.

Anyway, read the book. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.