DIT DAH KINDERGARTEN
I happen to be among those people who grew up during the days when a the telegraph was threatened by the development of radio.It was more of a fight than we might realize.
I remember quite well how we were fascinated by the clicking of the telegraph key at either the Western Union or Postal telegraph offices and, more dramatically, those at the railway station in our town where, on a hot, summer's day or night, a kid could sit on an unused American Express cart, on the station platform, and both watch and listen to the telegraph man as he sent coded signals on his shiny hand set. We could imagine the great feats he did by warning a speeding engineer that his train was about to go over a bridge which had been washed away in a flood moments before! It may have been he was asking the next train to stop at our small station ...perhaps to take a dying man to the hospital in the city miles away..
Whatever the actual message may have been about, it was known to be important if it merited telegraph service! The wires extended everywhere as the nervous system of our entire communications network. That was how we kept in touch with the rest of the world. All of our news of world events came in on the telegraph.
It seemed to be a strange world of mystery most of us. It seemed impossible that a man, seated before such a small apparatus could tap messages heard all over the world!
We came to know that it had all started during and after our Civil War time here in the United States. The code used by devised Samuel F. Morris and it has served us well in various forms.
We, as small children respected, admired and sometime, even feared, the men who could tap out coded messages. Many of us wanted to become “wireless”: operators when radio began to filter into the communications field. We wanted to learn how to send secret messages in code form. In some way, I suppose “wireless” sounded less expensive during Great Depression years, too, and in mixed innocence and ignorance, we learned how to handle it as a sight rather than a sound.
In the public mind the use of what was commonly called The Morse Code was complicated by the many ways in which it could be use. Our “Boy Scout Manual” manual gave us the basic knowledge required. We took to sided-issues such as learning to do semaphore messages waving small flags to the right or left in accordance with the dot-dash instructions in the Manual. A main reason for using flag was, of course, that they could be home-made, made while telegraph keys and the electrical apparatus needed to power them, were costly.
How many people people of my age learned the code from the Boy Scout Handbook, I wonder? I have long been grateful, as a ham radio operator of many years, for that kick-start assistance, but there is one flaw in that magic ointment of beginning which is that we learned it all as “dot” and “dash”. We have all have had to unlearn that visual concept and re-learn code as an aural thing. To get any speed and clarity ratings at all, we had to re-learn that the basic sounds are just that – sounds.
They are what they have always been: sounds - “dit” and “dah”
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A L M M A Y 4 2 0 0 3
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