Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: Who invented Morse Code?
Morse code is a character encoding scheme used in telecommunication that encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations called dots and dashes or dits and dahs.[2][3] Morse code is named for Samuel F. B. Morse, an inventor of the telegraph.
In the following example of a typical casual Morse code conversation between two stations there is extensive use of such: Morse code abbreviations, brevity codes, Morse procedural signs, and other such conventions.
Today among amateur operators there are several organizations that recognize high-speed code ability, one group consisting of those who can copy Morse at 60 wpm.[30] Also, Certificates of Code Proficiency are issued by several amateur radio societies, including the American Radio Relay League. Their basic award starts at 10 wpm with endorsements as high as 40 wpm, and are available to anyone who can copy the transmitted text. Members of the Boy Scouts of America may put a Morse interpreter's strip on their uniforms if they meet the standards for translating code at 5 wpm.
As of 2015, the United States Air Force still trains ten people a year in Morse.[24] The United States Coast Guard has ceased all use of Morse code on the radio, and no longer monitors any radio frequencies for Morse code transmissions, including the international medium frequency (MF) distress frequency of 500 kHz.[25] However, the Federal Communications Commission still grants commercial radiotelegraph operator licenses to applicants who pass its code and written tests.[26] Licensees have reactivated the old California coastal Morse station KPH and regularly transmit from the site under either this Call sign or as KSM. Similarly, a few US Museum ship stations are operated by Morse enthusiasts.[27]
Since the invention of radio at the end of the 19th century, ships at sea have relied on Morse code, invented by Samuel Morse and first used in 1844, for distress and safety telecommunications. The need for ship and coast radio stations to have and use radiotelegraph equipment, and to listen to a common radio frequency for Morse encoded distress calls, was recognized after the sinking of the liner RMS "Titanic" in the North Atlantic in 1912. The U.S. Congress enacted legislation soon after, requiring U.S. ships to use Morse code radiotelegraph equipment for distress calls. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), now a United Nations agency, followed suit for ships of all nations. Morse encoded distress calling has saved thousands of lives since its inception almost a century ago, but its use requires skilled radio operators spending many hours listening to the radio distress frequency. Its range on the medium frequency (MF) distress band (500 kHz) is limited, and the amount of traffic Morse signals can carry is also limited.
Michael Andrew Esposito was born in Gary, Indiana in 1964. He is a descendant of Alfred Vail who invented the Morse Code and several early telegraph devices with his partner Samuel Morse. The invention of the telegraph sparked the spiritualist movement of the middle 1800s and the telegraph was used in spirit communication. Another ancestor, Jonathan Harned Vail was office manager and assistant to Thomas Edison. Edison, in his later years attempted to develop a device for communicating with the dead. Michael studied communication theory at Purdue University, University of Notre Dame, American University in Cairo, Egypt and Governor's State University. During the Gulf War Michael was a Psy-ops officer in Iraq.
Morse code abbreviations are used to speed up Morse communications by foreshortening textual words and phrases. Morse abbreviations are short forms representing normal textual words and phrases formed from some (fewer) characters "borrowed" from the words or phrases being abbreviated. Aside: Morse code abbreviations are not the same as the so-called Prosigns for Morse code. Morse abbreviations are composed of (normal) textual alpha-numeric character symbols with normal Morse code inter-character spacing; the character symbols in abbreviations, unlike the delineated character groups representing Morse code prosigns, are not "run together" or concatenated in the way most prosigns for Morse code are formed.
ACP-131 CW Operators' Club Guglielmo Marconi High-speed telegraphy Hog morse Instructograph Morse code abbreviations Morse code mnemonics NATO phonetic alphabet Tap code Alfred Vail Wabun code Wireless telegraphy Theodore Roosevelt McElroy
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Samuel Morse developed a version of the electrical telegraph which he demonstrated on 2 September 1837. Alfred Vail saw this demonstration and joined Morse to develop the register—a telegraph terminal that integrated a logging device for recording messages to paper tape. This was demonstrated successfully over three miles (five kilometres) on 6 January 1838 and eventually over forty miles (sixty-four kilometres) between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore on 24 May 1844. The patented invention proved lucrative and by 1851 telegraph lines in the United States spanned over 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometres). Morse's most important technical contribution to this telegraph was the simple and highly efficient Morse Code, co-developed with Vail, which was an important advance over Wheatstone's more complicated and expensive system, and required just two wires. The communications efficiency of the Morse Code preceded that of the Huffman code in digital communications by over 100 years, but Morse and Vail developed the code purely empirically, with shorter codes for more frequent letters.
He was born in Morristown, New Jersey on July 21, 1809 to Stephen Vail. His brother, Alfred Vail, partnered with Samuel Morse to invent the telegraph and the Morse Code.
American Morse Code — also known as Railroad Morse—is the latter-day name for the original version of the Morse Code developed in the mid-1840s, by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail for their electric telegraph. The "American" qualifier was added because, after most of the rest of the world adopted "International Morse Code," the companies that continued to use the original Morse Code were mainly located in the United States. American Morse is now nearly extinct—it is most frequently seen in American railroad museums and American Civil War reenactments—and "Morse Code" today virtually always means the International Morse which supplanted American Morse.
Morse spent several months compiling this code dictionary. It is said by Morse supporters that Vail, in public and private writings, never claimed the code for himself. According to one researcher, in a February 1838 letter to his father, Judge Stephen Vail, Alfred wrote, "Professor Morse has invented a new plan of an alphabet, and has thrown aside the Dictionaries." In an 1845 book Vail wrote describing Morse's telegraph, he also attributed the code to Morse.
"Rag chewer" is a name applied to amateur radio Morse code operators who engage in informal Morse code conversations (known as "chewing the rag") while discussing subjects such as: the weather, their location, signal quality, and their equipment. Meaningful rag chewing between fluent Morse code operators having different native languages is possible because of a common language provided by the prosigns for Morse code, the International Q code, Z code, RST code, the telegraph era Phillips Code and many well known Morse code abbreviations as discussed in this Wikipedia article. Together all of these traditional conventions serve as a somewhat cryptic but commonly understood language (Lingua Franca) within the worldwide community of amateur radio Morse code operators.
The use of Morse code is over a century old. Fluent Morse code telegraphers still enjoy sending Morse code using manually operated mechanical keys or electronic keyers. Although Morse code is no longer used in commercial practices, the use of hand-sent Morse code seems to be growing among amateur radio operators, even though Morse proficiency is no longer required to obtain an amateur radio licence.
Morse code can be transmitted and received with very simple electrical equipment, such as the electrical telegraph invented in 1816. Morse code represents each letter of the alphabet as a series of "dots and dashes" (short and long bursts of electronically-generated noise). The speed of sending is directly related to the length of the shortest (dot) element: a dash is three dots long, an inter-character gap is the same length (3 dots), and inter-word and sentence gaps should be 5 or 7 dots long (change from earlier standard – 5 dots). The speed of sending is also referred to as words per minute, and is classically based on the 'paris' formula - as 'paris' is considered to be an average length word. See main article on Morse Code.
A signal lamp (sometimes called an Aldis lamp, after Arthur Cyril Webb Aldis who invented a widely used design, or a Morse lamp) is a visual signaling device for optical communication, typically using Morse code. Modern signal lamps are focused lamps which can produce a pulse of light. In large versions, this pulse is achieved by opening and closing shutters mounted in front of the lamp, either via a manually operated pressure switch or, in later versions, automatically. With hand held lamps, a concave mirror is tilted by a trigger to focus the light into pulses. The lamps were usually equipped with some form of optical sight, and were most commonly used on naval vessels and in airport control towers (using color signals for stop or clearance). In manual signaling, a signalman would aim the light at the recipient ship and turn a lever, opening and closing the shutter over the lamp, to emit flashes of light to spell out text messages in Morse code. On the recipient ship, a signalman would observe the blinking light, often with binoculars, translating the Morse code into text.
Over time, with the disappearance of landline telegraphy, and the end of commercial radio use of Morse Code, American Morse has become nearly extinct in some states. In the United States, the ranks of amateur radio operators used to include many active and retired commercial landline telegraph operators, who preferred to use American Morse for their amateur radio transmissions, so the CW (continuous wave) amateur bands used to have a mixture of American and International Morse. However, today even U.S. amateurs use International Morse almost exclusively.
Petzold begins with discussions of the inventions of Morse code and Braille, adds electricity, number systems, Boolean logic, and the resulting epiphanies required to put them all together economically. 
With these building blocks he builds circuits, relays, gates, switches, discusses the inventions of the vacuum tube, transistors, and finally the integrated circuit.
Friedrich Clemens Gerke (22 January 1801 – 21 May 1888) was a German writer, journalist, musician and pioneer of telegraphy who revised the Morse code in 1848. It is Gerke's version of the original (American) Morse code now known as the International Morse code and standardized by the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) which is used today.
In the mid-1800s, long before the advent of teleprinters and teletype machines, Morse code operators or telegraphists invented and used Morse code prosigns to encode white space text formatting in formal written text messages. In particular the Morse prosign represented by the concatenation of two literal textual Morse code "A" characters sent without the normal inter-character spacing is used in Morse code to encode and indicate a "new line" in a formal text message.
Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse collaborated in the invention of Morse code. A controversy exists over the role of each in the invention. The argument for Vail being the original inventor is laid out by several scholars.
To make Morse code communications faster and more efficient, there are many internationally agreed patterns or conventions of communication which include: extensive use of abbreviations, use of brevity codes such as the RST code, Q code, Z code as well as the use of Morse prosigns. The skills required to have efficient fast conversations with Morse comprise more than simply knowing the Morse code symbols for the alphabet and numerals. Skilled telegraphists must also know many traditional International Morse code communications conventions.
Morse code has been in use for more than 160 years—longer than any other electrical coding system. What is called Morse code today is actually somewhat different from what was originally developed by Vail and Morse. The Modern International Morse code, or continental code, was created by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and initially used for telegraphy between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in Germany. Gerke changed nearly half of the alphabet and all of the numerals, providing the foundation for the modern form of the code. After some minor changes, International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in 1865 in Paris and was later made the standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Morse's original code specification, largely limited to use in the United States and Canada, became known as American Morse code or railroad code. American Morse code is now seldom used except in historical re-enactments.
In the late 1890s, radio communication—initially known as "wireless telegraphy"—was invented, and used Morse Code transmissions. Most radio operators used the version of the Code that they were most familiar with—the American Morse Code in the United States, and Continental Morse in Europe. However, because of the long range of radio signals, a single international standard was needed, especially for seagoing vessels. 
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, OIC (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.