American Morse Code

This Article was written by Tom Cash, a member of The Chattanooga Amateur Radio Club.

The Sound of American Morse Code

I suspect that there are not many who remember the sound. To me it is a whisper of days and years forever past. I can recall the magical sound from early childhood, when my dad would take me with him to the depot.

He would give me paper to draw on and stamp with all those rubber stamps.

The little brown box thing on the front by the windows looking out to where the great thundering trains roared by clattered almost continually.

For me the sound had no meaning. Occasionally my dad would operate a little machine that made the brown box clatter. At times after listening to the clatter, he would sit down at the typewriter and roll paper in and type something. Then he would take the paper, string it on a big hoop.

And when a train came by, dad would go out by the track and the engineer would hold his arm out and snag the string with the paper dad had typed.

I learned later that this paper was a “train order", instructions for the engineer.

That clattering and the little triangular brown box with the Prince Albert tobacco can crammed into it for amplification was a vital link controlling the traffic flow of the nations main mode of commerce and transportation.

Today we cannot imagine how much everyone relied on the fragile wire strung between stations, those huge glass jars with the big copper claws immersed in acid, and the skill of telegraphers at hundreds of stations like my dad’s depot at Eddyville, KY.

Telegraph controlled time standards. In the central time zone, the clicking would start a few minutes before eleven a. m. and when there was a little pause and then a single click, the big hand in the big round clock in the waiting room would jump straight up to eleven o’clock. My dad told me that click came from the Naval Observatory somewhere in the Washington D. C. area. Dad was also Mr. Western Union for our hometown.

This was in the late 1920’s. I was probably five or six. Yes, don’t bother to figure it out –I am 89.

I still have some of that telegraphic paraphernalia – the sounder, the straight key, and the “Bug” by Vibroplex. I don’t have the little brown box that housed the sounder. You will be able to hear how it sounds.

The paddles are worn down but still work. I am sure Dad bought this stuff second hand. I think it dates from about 1913. It is probably a hundred years old.

That is fifty years after the Battle of Chicamauga and the Battle Above the Clouds, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. It may have been instruments like these that let General Grant inform President Lincoln how the battles were progressing. Telegraphy and snail mail were the only communications over long distances. Short range communication was by courier on foot or on horseback.

I don’t pretend to know American Morse Code. Many of the characters are different from the code we use today. ...

Some of you old timers may remember it. And maybe even the lonesome sound of that steam whistle from a coal-fired steam locomotive.

Tom K4ZQX

To read more about the American Code, HERE'S THE LINK

For a picture of a Sounder, HERE'S A LINK

To hear the sound of the Sounder, HERE'S THE LINK

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