The Titanic famously (or infamously) used Morse code to call out in distress at the end of its final voyage. Ships at sea and the land-based stations that supported them used Morse code for decades, ...

The first message sent by Morse code's dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844-175 years ago. It signaled the first time in human ...

In the modern world of smartphones and lightning fast internet, amateur (ham) radio operators still enjoy communicating over the radio by tapping telegraph keys just like the pioneers did in the ...

Thanks to Samuel F.B. Morse, communication changed rapidly, and has been changing ever faster since. He invented the electric telegraph in 1832. It took six more years for him to standardize a code ...

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to learn a new language is immersion: just throw someone into a situation where they have no choice, and they’ll learn by context. Militaries use immersion ...

From NATO phonetic to the Greek alphabet, plus historic military codes, Morse Symbols, and other tricky letter systems, there ...

Navy ships typically communicate with each other via radio or satellites, but every ship has a few backups just in case. One of the most common backups is the signal lamp, where sailors can send Morse ...

A character code invented by Samuel Morse that is represented by the duration of a single tone. Written as dots, dashes and spaces, the first Morse code message was sent in 1844 over a newly ...

The other day I bought some old books, one of which was all about radio. It was from 1925, and proved to be a repository of perhaps the worst writing I have ever consumed. But one section stood out.

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. is a former senior reviewer who worked at The Verge from 2011 until May 2025. His coverage areas included audio, ...

The first message sent by Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore on Friday, May 24, 1844 – 175 years ago. It signaled the first time in human ...