Blog Post #4: An introduction to Morse code
Do you know how to spell your name in Morse code? The answer to that question is most likely no, as it is not a skill that is used in the 21st century. In the early 1800s, however, Morse code was the most efficient method of communication, using a telegraph. This code consists of dots and dashes, which you may already know. One detail that was crucial to making Morse code easier to decipher was making the dots and dashes easy to distinguish while hearing them through a telegraph. In order to achieve this, it was decided that a dash would be three times the duration of a dot. This made it much easier to tell whether you were hearing a dash or a dot. In order to make messages easier to decipher, it was also decided that the most common letters would have the shortest combinations of dots and dashes. This way, someone sending a telegraph did not have to manually enter as many inputs, and someone receiving the telegraph did not have to count as many outputs. Even though technology has advanced so far since then, this technology truly was groundbreaking in its era. Using the definition of digital as explained in a previous blog post, Morse Code would technically be considered a digital process. A digital process is one that has a finite, or countible, number of inputs or signals. In Morse Code, there are only dots and dashes, so this process is digital.
This post was proofread by ChatGPT.