Modern warfare is packed with cutting-edge technology – from artificial intelligence to drones and hypersonic missiles – but one technology that’s more than a century old is still proving its value: Morse code.
The streams of staccato tones, which a railroad worker from more than 150 years ago would instantly recognize, are still used by the Russian army in the Ukrainian war.
Even today many people could identify the characteristic sound of Morse code, especially the well-known pattern three short, three long, three short (… – – – …), which forms the SOS emergency signal.
Today messages are sent in Morse code from Russian bombers to their control centers, or from ships of the Baltic Fleet to their headquarters on land.
The shortwave bands used by amateur radio are similarly filled with beeps known to enthusiasts as “dits” (.) and “dahs” (-), or as dots and dashes by the general public. Even spies still tune into the shortwave bands to listen to clandestine stations transmitting in Morse code.
Invented in the 19th century
So why is a technology created in the first half of the 19th century still used today?
First of all, Morse code was not conceived by an engineer or technological wizard, but by a man who made his living painting portraits. Samuel Morse initially designed what we would today call a teleprinter, a device that receives and prints text on paper.
Morse enlisted the help of Alfred Vail, a machinist more interested in mechanics, to work out the details. It was the latter who created the dots and dashes to represent the code and came up with the idea of using sound to transmit information.
At first, the sound was intended only to test a connection. Before long, Morse and Vail realized that the idea of printing was not practical. However, By adding sound, they stumbled upon a concept that was more brilliant and useful than they could imagine.
The notable feature of Morse code is that, in sound form, it forms a rhythm. Therefore, it has points in common with music. In fact, it has been observed that musically talented people can learn Morse more quickly.
By stimulating the innate human sense of rhythm, Morse code also activates our sense of pattern recognition. This is a skill deeply rooted in our brain and has great potential to decipher messages even if they are incomplete.
An experienced Morse code operator can fill in blanks caused by interference, poor reception, noise, or equipment malfunction.
In a neurological sense, Morse inhabits a very peculiar niche, which has been compared to “reading with your ears.”but where transmitting and receiving are more similar to the act of speaking than to writing.
The other notable aspect of Morse code is its technological simplicity. Anyone with basic technological knowledge can build their own transmitter using standard components.
The signal generated by a Morse transmitter is similarly minimalist and uses a very narrow bandwidth of only 100-150 hertz (standard voice communications uses 2500-3000 hertz).
This also means that receivers can use very narrow filters and thus eliminate much of the ambient noise generated by various forms of interference.
Being so efficient, Morse only needs a minimum of power to travel significant distances.
Radio amateurs demonstrated in 1956 that only 78 milliwatts may be enough energy to transmit from Massachusetts to Denmark.
This is less than a tenth of what a single LED bulb uses. When a standard coffee maker brews most people’s favorite morning beverage, it uses more than a thousand times that energy.
🇷🇺Russian Navy Baltic Fleet HQ Kaliningrad [RMP] sending Morse code weather conditions to REO. REO is a collective callsign meaning “To all Russian ships in Baltic Sea”.
Received in 🇮🇹Milan Italy 8417KHz April 15 2024 at 1801z pic.twitter.com/HloKlrZRKr— Shortwave78 (@shortwave78) April 15, 2024
This combination of technological simplicity and efficiency proved useful during World War II, when members of the resistance and Allied commandos used their portable Morse transceivers to maintain contact with London from inside German-occupied territory.
It was a very risky undertaking, since the Germans were constantly listening to the airwaves. Morse code, while unintelligible to the untrained ear, does not offer security in and of itself.
Today, even those without training can use software to decipher the contents of a message sent using Morse code. However, any message can be made secure by encrypting it before sending it, as Vail proposed in 1845.
In fact, one of the most secure forms of encryption, “single-use notebook”, requires nothing more than a pencil and paper. Basically, a single-use pad is a random string of characters, at least as long as the message to be encrypted.
The sender uses his pad to encrypt, while the recipient uses a copy of the same pad to decode the message (there should only be two copies and each must be destroyed immediately after use).
As long as a notebook is never reused, it remains theoretically unbreakable, even with the most modern technology (although it is difficult to produce truly random sequences of characters).
Although there are more efficient digital communication technologies today, nothing can rival the unsurpassed combination of simplicity and efficiency which has allowed morse code to survive for more than 150 years.
*Tony Ingesson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lund University.
*This article was published on The Conversation and reproduced here under the Creative Commons license. click here to read the original version and see links to the cited studies.
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