Morse Code

Morse code is a telecommunications method that encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two signal lengths, called dots and dashes or dits and dahs, and is named for Samuel Morse, one of several people who developed it. Morse's original proposal for a telegraph code was reworked into an alphabet based code by his engineering collaborator Alfred Vail, whose version became the standard for commercial telegraphy in North America, while Friedrich Gerke's simplification of Vail's code became the basis of the version later adopted across Europe and, largely unchanged, by the International Telecommunication Union. The system can be sent and read directly by a trained person, commonly by on-off keying of a medium such as electric current, radio waves, light or sound, and Vail originally assigned shorter codes to more frequently used English letters, such as a single dit for the letter E, to increase transmission efficiency.