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What Hath God Wrought?On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse dispatched the first telegraphic message over an experimental line from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23 and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend.

Genius.com, a site specialising in providing song lyrics, had suspected that Google had been scraping its site and using the lyrics to populate the 'information panels' often seen in the side of search results. This isn't that uncommon, but usually Google credits the source; in this case, Genius was getting no credit. Sure enough, Google pulled the lyric through and repeated the message, without ever knowing that's what it had done. But Genius wasn't going to take that lying down. The company wanted to prove that Google was indeed sourcing uncredited, and set about proving it by matching high tech...

The former U.S. Senator from Alabama, Navy admiral and Vietnam prisoner of war who blinked “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse Code to alert the world of abuse by his North Vietnamese captors, died on Friday.

Former Alabama Sen. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., a prisoner of war for more than seven years in North Vietnam, died on Friday in Virginia Beach. Mr. Denton was 89 years old. His son, Jim Denton, told The Washington Post, which first reported the news, that his father died of a heart ailment. Mr. Denton, a retired U.S. Rear Admiral, was shot down over the city of Thanh Hoa in Vietnam in 1965 and captured while leading a bombing mission. He later wrote a book about his experiences. Mr. Denton grabbed national attention in 1966 when he was forced to give...

TECHNOLOGY 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective. By Brett Sokol Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology...

NASA’s Curiosity rover may not look like an urban menace, but the robot explorer will in fact be steadily tagging the Martian surface as it trundles, leaving a name-check of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back home. The clandestine graffiti is thanks to part of the rover’s visual odometry system, John Graham-Cumming points out, which tracks the marks left by a series of asymmetrically arranged holes in the wheels. The position of those holes, however, isn’t random: in fact, it’s Morse Code.

To think that Boris and Natasha lived right here in South Dakota, and we didn't even know it! Recently, Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber-Trebilcock-Myers - a couple who once lived in Aberdeen - were arrested for spying. The news rocked the nation. Well, actually, the nation immediately forgot the story. Still, South Dakota hasn't forgotten. It's not every day suspected spies are found traipsing through your own neighborhood. The espionage likely started after they left Aberdeen, but you still wonder if that abandoned shopping cart you saw in aisle 8 of Kessler's might have contained a coded message. The...

An evening view of the city's Downtown skyline offers more than just a beautiful blend of old and new architecture towering over glistening moonlit rivers. If you look high atop the 33-story Grant Building, you see the red neon lights flashing, in International Morse Code, a one-word message: "P-I-T-E-T-S-B-K-R-R-H" Wait, that's not right, said Tom Stepleton, as he decoded the message while waiting to see the city's Fourth of July fireworks show with friends at the Brew House on the South Side. "I was looking at it, and I saw the letter 'K,' which is [dash-dot-dash]," Mr. Stepleton said. "I...

Google marks Samuel Morse's birthday with code logo Google is marking the birthday of Samuel Morse by translating its name into dots and dashes for the day. By Matthew Moore 27 Apr 2009 Google regularly releases versions of its logo to mark major world events and anniversaries. [Pic Logo in URL] Visitors to the search engine's home page this morning were met with the code "–. --- --- –. .-.. ." instead of the usual Google logo. The witty doodle is intended to honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the single wire telegraph, who was born on April...

Morse code is in need of some serious SOS. The language of dots and dashes, first used during the infancy of electronic communication in the mid-1800s, is going the way of Latin. Beginning today, amateur or "ham" radio operators in the United States won't be tested in Morse code – also known as Continuous Wave – in order to be licensed by the federal government. In an effort to advance the hobby, the Federal Communications Commission in December agreed to eliminate the five-words-per-minute Morse code requirement for people seeking their upper-level class licenses.

NEWINGTON, CT, Dec 15, 2006 -- In an historic move, the FCC has acted to drop the Morse code requirement for all Amateur Radio license classes. The Commission today adopted, but hasn't yet released, the long-awaited Report and Order (R&O) in WT Docket 05-235, the "Morse code" proceeding.SNIP "This change eliminates an unnecessary regulatory burden that may discourage current Amateur Radio operators from advancing their skills and participating more fully in the benefits of Amateur Radio," the FCC said. The ARRL had asked the FCC to retain the 5 WPM for Amateur Extra class applicants only. The FCC proposed earlier...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: December 15, 2006 Chelsea Fallon: (202) 418-7991 FCC MODIFIES AMATEUR RADIO SERVICE RULES, ELIMINATING MORSE CODE EXAM REQUIREMENTS AND ADDRESSING ARRL PETITION FOR RECONSIDERATION Washington, D.C. – Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted a Report and Order and Order on Reconsideration (Order) that modifies the rules for the Amateur Radio Service by revising the examination requirements for obtaining a General Class or Amateur Extra Class amateur radio operator license and revising the operating privileges for Technician Class licensees. In addition, the Order resolves a petition filed by the American Radio Relay League, Inc....

Last month, a briefly worded press release went nearly unnoticed. It simply read: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging Services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage." After 155 years, and millions of telegrams and Telex messages, a major part of American history quietly slipped into obscurity. For more than 100 years, Socorro was part of that history. With today's telephones, cell phones and e-mail, we can contact almost anyone we wish immediately and cheaply. This wasn't always the case. In Socorro's early days,...

A century-old hobby filled with dots and dashes is embroiled in a debate about its future and what level of training should be expected of those called on to help during local and national emergencies. Morse code, a slowly dying language, has become radio's equivalent of Latin: historically important, but increasingly irrelevant in a world of cell phones, computers and instant messaging. With mariners and the military having moved to other technologies long ago, ham radio operators are virtually the sole practitioners of a technique that made national and international communication possible with the telegraph.

The Maritime Radio Historical Society, in cooperation with the Marconi Conference Center, will return historic Morse code radio station KPH to the air from its original Marin county, CA location on Sunday, 26 February. KPH, once called the "wireless giant of the Pacific", arrived in Marin county in the early 1920s. With its receiving station at Marshall, CA and transmitters at Bolinas, CA, KPH provided telegram service to ships at sea via Morse code. Operation at Marshall continued until the beginning of WWII when KPH was shut down for the duration. After the war the receiving station was moved to...

Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor LiveScience.com Wed Feb 1, 10:00 AM ET After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: "Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please...

It may have been Friday the Thirteenth, but it was a lucky day for Morse code--and particularly for veteran CW contest ops Chip Margelli, K7JA, and Ken Miller, K6CTW. During a May 13 appearance on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the pair was able to pass a message using good old fashioned Morse code more rapidly than a pair of teenaged text messengers equipped with modern cell phones. The victory, which replicated a similar challenge that took place recently in Australia, has provided immense encouragement to Amateur Radio's community of CW operators, who been ballyhooed the achievement all...

April 16, 2005 A race to the wire as old hand at Morse code beats txt msgrs By Mark Henderson DOTTY and old-fashioned means of communication can still be the best: Morse code has seen off the challenge of the text message in a contest pitting the best in 19th-century technology against its 21st-century successor. The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of...

Randy Gehman, N3LJE, of Waminster ARC talks with members of the Morse Family. One of the greatest things about Amateur Radio is that you just never know who you will run into. Such was the case for Warminster Amateur Radio Club at the special event station the club set up at the Middletown Grange Fair in Wrightstown in Bucks County Pennsylvania. For decades the club has had an Amateur Radio station on display every year at the Grange Fair where they provide information about ham radio to the public. The club accepts messages from fairgoers and passes the messages...