Morse Code Day!
This is a good day to write your name in morse code.
Brownielocks came up with a day to think about Morse code. She called it...
Learn Your Name in Morse Code Day
The date, January 11, commemorates the day in 1838 when Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail first publicly demonstrated the telegraph. The New Jersey Historical Society thinks it was on January 6.
You might be wondering what dots and dashes have to do with fruitful dialogue.
Stay with me.
The Most Basic Layer
When we talk about communication, we often start with what we're saying—the content, the arguments, the ideas. But underneath all of that lies a more fundamental question: How does the signal even get from me to you?
Communication theorists talk about layers. At the top, there's meaning and interpretation. In the middle, there's language and grammar. But at the very bottom, there's something almost mechanical: the physical signal itself. The vibration of air. The marks on a page. The electrical pulse down a wire.
Morse code lives at that bottom layer. It's about as fundamental as communication gets: on or off, short or long, sound or silence.
Di-dah. That's the letter A.
A Partnership, and a Rift
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough.
We call it Morse code. But there's good evidence that Alfred Vail—not Samuel Morse—designed much of the code system we actually use today. Morse was the visionary, the promoter, the one who saw the potential and secured the big funding. Vail was the engineer, the one who made the thing actually work.
Vail improved the mechanical design of the telegraph. He likely developed the elegant system of assigning shorter codes to more frequent letters (E is just a single dit; Q is dah-dah-di-dah). He was, by many accounts, the one who turned a concept into a practical tool.
But Vail signed an agreement giving Morse the credit. He spent years feeling under-recognized. He eventually left telegraphy, bitter about how history was recording his contributions.
The name "Morse code" itself might be a kind of miscommunication—a failure to acknowledge the full story.
How often does that happen? One person gets the credit, another does the work. One voice gets amplified, another gets forgotten. It's worth noticing. And it's worth asking, when we're in dialogue with someone, whose contributions are we not seeing?
The Beauty of Constraint
There's something almost poetic about Morse code. You have exactly two building blocks: a short signal (dit) and a long signal (dah). The dah is three times the length of the dit. That's it. From these two elements—and the silences between them—you can encode any letter, any number, any message.
The timing matters:
- One dit-length of silence between the elements of a single letter
- Three dit-lengths between letters
- Seven dit-lengths between words
The constraints force clarity. You can't mumble in Morse code. Every signal is deliberate. Even so, experienced listeners often recognize senders by their "hand", as one might recognize speakers.
This timing is important in Morse code; there are timing constraints. If timing has to be flexible, then then a tap code is needed as in striking a spoon on a pipe. If timing is very poor, some kind of framing is needed.
This is especially important for the Dah, the three-unit ON signal. A percussion method does not work. Loudness is unreliable. Maybe one workaround is a fast tap, say a two per Morse code unit. A dit is titit and a dah is tititititititit. That seem awfully hard. Maybe some kind of raking can be found. Usually, something else is needed.
I find this instructive. Sometimes constraints don't limit communication—they clarify it. When we have to be precise, we often become more precise. When we have only dots and dashes, we choose our words carefully.
Try It Yourself
Here's a little tool. Type your name and watch the pattern emerge.
The visual shows you the actual timing—each dit and dah as a rectangle, the spaces between them, the letters underneath. Hit play and you'll hear it: 700 Hz, the classic telegraph tone.
Notice how short E is (just dit) and how long Q is (dah-dah-di-dah). That's not random. In English, E is the most common letter. Vail—or Morse, depending on whom you believe—assigned the shortest codes to the most frequent letters. Efficiency built into the structure.
Adaptation
Here's what fascinates me most about Morse code: it adapts to almost any medium.
You can transmit it as:
- Sound (beeps, whistles)
- Light (flashlights, ship lamps, the flicker of a candle)
- Touch (touching on someone's hand or shoulder)
- Vision (waving flags, arm movements, blinking)
- Electrical pulses
This adaptability is why Morse code has never quite died. Pilots still learn it. Sailors still use it. The international distress signal—SOS, three short, three long, three short—works precisely because it's unmistakable and requires no special equipment. Just a way to make a pattern.
People have used this adaptability in remarkable ways.
During the Vietnam War, Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was captured and forced to participate in a televised propaganda interview. While speaking to the camera, he blinked the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code. His captors didn't notice. American intelligence did. (Note that blinking includes timing; it was not a tap code but actual Morse code.)
That's communication at its most essential: finding a channel, encoding a message, hoping someone on the other end is listening carefully enough to receive it.
The V for Victory
In January 1941, Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian broadcaster working for the BBC, had an idea. He encouraged listeners in occupied Europe to chalk the letter V on walls—V for victoire, V for vrijheid, V for victory. A small act of defiance. A way to signal to neighbors: I haven't given up. Have you?
The letter V in Morse code is di-di-di-dah. Short-short-short-long. It happens to match the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The BBC began using those four notes as an interval signal before broadcasts to occupied territories. German music, reclaimed as a symbol of resistance against Nazi Germany.
This was open, not hidden. The message was clear to anyone listening: We are here. You are not alone.
What Does This Have to Do with Fruitful Dialogue?
Everything, maybe.
Fruitful dialogue isn't just about having the right ideas or finding the right words. It's about transmission. It's about making sure the signal gets from here to there, clearly enough that someone else can decode it.
When dialogue breaks down, it's often not because people disagree about the content. It's because the signal itself got garbled somewhere. The tone was wrong. The timing was off. The channel was noisy. One person was transmitting on one frequency, and the other was listening on another.
Morse code reminds us that communication is, at its core, a physical act. It requires attention. It requires patience. It requires someone willing to encode out the message and someone else willing to listen for it.
We will be continue in more posts on the physical layer of communication, person and person, person and machine, and person & person through machine. This is at the signal encoding layer.
Di-dah. Are you receiving?
Your Turn
So here's a small challenge for Learn Your Name in Morse Code Day.
Use the tool above. Learn your name. Maybe hum it. Maybe blink it to yourself in the mirror.
And then think about this: What other channels do you have available to you? When one way of communicating isn't working, what else might?
Sometimes fruitful dialogue means finding a different frequency.
💡 Did you try the Morse code tool?
📡 What channels of communication do you find yourself relying on?
🔦 Have you ever had to find an unconventional way to get a message across?
Morse Code Commemorative Coin
You can put this in your pocket and use it as a reference for both sending and receiving Morse code. A Mouth Fruit fan has one.
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