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?
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I worked with an experienced coder who had a hard time with me because I was sending letters while he worked with whole words. It’s a whole different mind set for sure.
I’m no expert on Morse code, and several others have given far more detailed information than I can, but I will add that from watching a British reality show in which contestants were put through Ww2 SOE (counterintelligence/espionage/sabotage) training, one of the tasks was learn how to transmit and receive Morse code messages. The show mentioned that mistakes were pretty common, but could usually be corrected via common sense. Just like in modern day texting conversations, missing he “t” in “the” is usually a pretty simple and easy to override mistake.
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>so fast it’s hard to tell
That’s actually part of what makes it work so well. An experienced operator won’t think in dots and dashes, just like you don’t think of individual lines but whole letters when reading a written text.
When people first began to type on mobile phones they were slow, now people can type at 100’s of words per minute, same thing applies to almost any physical skill. We got good over time.
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Because you don’t hear the individual dots and dashes. After a while, you hear them combining into words. That’s how I learned it. It starts to sound like a monotone song.
Source: me. I used to be able to send and receive upwards of 20 words per minute. That was many years ago, and I’ve lost a good bit of it. But if I hear a snip go by in a movie or something, the words still jump out.
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.
Had master morse code expert who could listen to three streams of morse at the same time. Just like you can follow three speakers. At a party.
Morse code is full of acronyms and idioms. The sound of these are recognized as whole words.
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