The first binary code that needs no machine to decode: Read to know about Morse code

“Bro, watched that new Alia Bhatt movie, Raazi? If not, leave everything and watch it now.”, Prakhar said with his signature excited tone when he talks about something he really believes to be good. I strongly believe, he should be in sales and marketing. “No, I haven’t yet. But I think I’ll watch it today evening. It is already on Amazon Prime”, I responded and told myself to watch it ASAP, for two good reasons: One, when Prakhar recommends a movie, it ought to be good and you don’t want to miss it. Two, he was going to ask this again, and if I haven’t watched it before he asks next time, I am doomed. We continued our phone conversation about various other things including future of our blog, WittyScribble(which by the way, rests is our hands as you read this. Please show us some love by liking and sharing our posts 😊).

I watched the movie later that day. As expected from a movie recommended by Prakhar, I liked it a lot and so did Himanshi(my better half). So, I am going to write a detailed movie review of Raazi in this week’s post. Just Kidding. That’s not what the title of the post suggests, right?

In the movie, Alia’s character, Sehmat, is seen communicating with her other aides using a special device and a secret coded language. That’s what we are going to talk about today.

Representation of 'straight key' that was used by Sehmat in Raazi.

The Morse Code, that encodes any text information in to a series of ON-OFF signals, with ON signal of two varying time durations, short and long. This signal can be in form of light, sound or clicks. The long and short ON signals are referred as ‘dash’ and ‘dot’ respectively, with dash being three times longer than dot in terms of ‘ON’ time. ‘Dash’ and ‘dot’ are also referred as ‘dahs’ and ‘dits’.

The code is standardized internationally and can be directly decoded by an experienced and skilled listener without using any decoding equipment. The International Morse code represents each letter with a specific sequence of dots and dashes. Each dot or dash has a small silence time following it. The international code for English has codes defined for all Latin alphabets, Arabic numerals and some punctuation marks. Other languages that use more than 26 roman alphabets have extended Morse codes as well.

History and Development:

In 1836-37, as a part of their work on electric telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed the first coding system that used dots and dashes to represent letters. Vail also developed a receptor that can receive and write these dots and dashes on a moving paper tape. While the initial version had codes for numbers only, in 1840, Vail extended it to include codes for alphabets and few special chars as well so it can be more widely used. While assigning the codes to letters, Vail did research on most widely used alphabets, and assigned shorter codes to the alphabets that are more frequently used. E being the most used alphabet in English, gets the shortest code, a single dot.

In 1848, Friedrich Clemens Gerke, a German pioneer in telegraphy refined the code developed by Morse and Vail to large extent. The international Morse Code in use today is a lot closer to Gerke’s code. The International code was adopted in 1865.

In 1890, the Morse code found extensive usage in radio communications. It was also widely used in WWII.

The Morse code is still used widely in fields like aviation, Amateur Radio.

The Code:

The code represents alphabets and words in terms of on and off states. Since the Morse Code uses only two states, on and off, it can be considered as the first digital code and can be represented as binary.

The following 5 elements are used:

S.No	Element	Symbol	State	Unit of time	Binary representation
1	Short mark - Dot or dit	.	On	1 unit	1
2	Long mark - Dash or dah	-	On	3 units	111
3	Short gap – gap between each element (dot or dash)	1 space	Off	1 unit	0
4	Medium gap – gap between each alphabet	3 spaces	Off	3 units	000
5	Long gap – gap between each word	7 spaces (or /)	Off	7 units	0000000

Picture below shows the list of alphabets and numbers represented in International Morse code.

James Kanjo [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons

List of International Morse Code for English alphabet and numerals

Nerd Note 1: International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized the International Morse Code. It adopted Gerke’s version with some minor changes. Gerke however, in his version, changes the code for almost half of the alphabets and numerals from how they were coded in Morse and Vail’s work. But as always, the first one to device the code gets to keep the name, thus it is popularly called Morse code and not Gerke Code.

Nerd Note 2: I am sure you must have used a Nokia phone at some point in your life. The basic handset, before the era of smart phones had a very particular tone for messages. It was (. . .   - -   .  .  .). Look carefully and you will find out that this is nothing but Morse Code for letters S, M and S. Thus, that tone is Morse code sound for SMS. Here is a youtube video of the iconic nokia ringtone.

Nerd Note 3: Another internationally recognized Morse code is the one for SOS. It is the most common distress signal and can be represented as three dots, three dashes, three dots (.  .  .  -  -  -  .  .  .). Try this, open the flash light in your smart phone and click on SOS. Observe the flashlight pattern. It will follow same pattern. I did a video showing the same. This is also our first ever video. Please watch and leave a comment. 

Movies not only entertain us but at times open doors for thoughts that lead us to knowledge. Raazi did the same for me. Many of my friends have been asking me how I find the topics on which I write. My answer: It is all around us. At times, it something I see during my run, or some scene in a movie that can inspire a post, like this one. The World around us has never and will never fail to inspire us.

And as always,

- .... .- -. -.- ... / ..-. --- .-. / .-. . .- -.. .. -. --. (click here to decode this)