Machines · Study 068
Morse Telegraph
A telegraph register inks Morse code onto moving paper tape while a lamp flashes the signal and the decoded letters appear below.
What you're looking at
The pen touches the tape whenever the key is down. A dot is one unit long and a dash is three. Gaps carry meaning too: one unit between marks, three between letters, seven between words. The text underneath fills in each letter as its last mark finishes.
The idea behind it
Samuel Morse's first long distance message, sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844, read 'What hath God wrought'. Early receivers embossed or inked tape like this one. Operators soon found they could decode by ear from the clicking of the mechanism, and the tape fell out of everyday use.
Try this
Click or tap to skip to the next message in the queue.
