From: ritter@io.com (Terry Ritter)
Subject: Re: Sending Messages in Morse Code
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 02:52:35 GMT
Newsgroups: sci.crypt,sci.math
Summary: [missing]

On Wed, 02 Aug 2000 18:15:15 GMT, in
<398858e6.12292435@news.cwcom.net>, in sci.crypt
dynastic@REMOVE_THIScwcom.net (JimD) wrote:

>On Wed, 02 Aug 2000 02:42:05 GMT, ritter@io.com (Terry Ritter) wrote:
>[...]
> what we
>>normally think of as "Morse code" is International Morse, as
>>standardized in Europe.  It is good but not ideal for English.  
>
>Why not?  There are symbols for the most common punctuation
>as well as most accented letters for other languages.

The International Morse that we know uses two keying lengths -- dot
(length 1) and dash (length 3) -- with dot-length spacing between dots
and dashes in a single character.

American Morse was only partly like that:  Some characters (e.g., C,
O, R, Y, Z) had a longer spacing mid-character.  


     "In Europe, an Austrian, Frederick Gerke, developed a variation
of the Morse code that was adopted there.  Many of the letters are the
same in both codes.  However, Gerke simplified the code by using only
one space length and only two pulse lengths ('dits' and 'dahs').
Gerke's code was easier to learn than Morse's, but it was somewhat
slower.  One interesting character is the letter 'O,' which is three
dahs in Gerke's code.  This is much longer than Morse's O, which is a
pair of dits.  Morse made O short because O is the fourth most common
letter in English.  However, in German, O is an uncommon letter,
ranking only 16th, and for this reason was made long."

Rutledge, D.  1999.  The Electronics of Radio.  Cambridge University
Press.  p. 308.

---
Terry Ritter   ritter@io.com   http://www.io.com/~ritter/
Crypto Glossary   http://www.io.com/~ritter/GLOSSARY.HTM