Morse-code character signals dash to digital

By David Kohn
The Baltimore Sun

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Morse code is entering the 21st century — or at least the late 20th.

The 160-year-old communication system now has a new character to denote the "@" symbol used in e-mail addresses.

In December, the International Telecommunications Union, which oversees the entire frequency spectrum, from amateur radio to satellites, voted to add the new character.

The new sign, which will be known as a "commat," consists of the signals for "A" (dot-dash) and "C" (dash-dot-dash-dot), with no space between them.

The new sign is the first in at least several decades, and possibly much longer. Among ITU officials and Morse code aficionados, no one could remember any other addition.

"It's a pretty big deal," said Paul Rinaldo, chief technical officer for the American Radio Relay League, the national association for amateur-radio operators. "There certainly hasn't been any change since before World War II."

The change will allow ham-radio operators to exchange e-mail more easily. That's because — in an irony of the digital age — they often use Morse to initiate conversations over the Internet.

"People trade their e-mail addresses a lot," said Nick Yocanovich, a Morse-code enthusiast who lives in Arnold, Md.

Morse code uses two audible electrical signals — short "dots" and slightly longer "dashes" — to form letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Created in the 1830s by Samuel F.B. Morse, who invented the telegraph, the electronic signaling system spread across the world. Until the past few decades, it was used widely by the public, industry and government.
 
"It was the beginning of the Information Age," said Gary Fowlie, chief of media relations and public information for the ITU, which has its headquarters in Geneva.

When Morse died in 1872, more than 650,000 miles of telegraph wire circled the globe. By the early 20th century, Morse messages were being sent wirelessly via radio.

Perhaps the most famous Morse communication is the international distress signal S-O-S. It consists of three dots, three dashes and three more dots.

But with the proliferation of digital communications technologies such as cellphones, satellites and the Internet, Morse code has lost its pre-eminent place in global communications.

"There's really no reason to use it anymore," said Robert Colburn, research coordinator for the History Center of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Today it's largely the province of ham-radio operators, including 700,000 in the United States. While not all of them communicate regularly in Morse, almost all are familiar with it.

Some ham operators wouldn't mind more changes to spice up the language. Although Morse code has a period, a question mark and even a semicolon, it offers no simple way to articulate excitement.

"I was hoping they'd add a character for the exclamation point," Yocanovich said. "It expresses an emotion that's difficult to get across any other way."

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