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8 views1 page

code13

Uploaded by

Maya Koopla
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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2 Chapter One

the air, you find that it’s too hard to assemble the multiple strokes together
in your head. These swirls and slashes of light are just not precise enough.
Perhaps you once saw a movie in which a couple of sailors signaled to
each other across the sea with blinking lights. In another movie, a spy wig-
gled a mirror to reflect the sunlight into a room where another spy lay
captive. Maybe that’s the solution. So you first devise a simple technique:
Each letter of the alphabet corresponds to a series of flashlight blinks. An A
is 1 blink, a B is 2 blinks, a C is 3 blinks, and so on to 26 blinks for Z. The
word BAD is 2 blinks, 1 blink, and 4 blinks with little pauses between the
letters so you won’t mistake the 7 blinks for a G. You’ll pause a bit longer
between words.
This seems promising. The good news is that you no longer have to wave
the flashlight in the air; all you need do is point and click. The bad news
is that one of the first messages you try to send (“How are you?”) turns
out to require a grand total of 131 blinks of light! Moreover, you forgot
about punctuation, so you don’t know how many blinks correspond to a
question mark.
But you’re close. Surely, you think, somebody must have faced this
problem before, and you’re absolutely right. With a trip to the library or
an internet search, you discover a marvelous invention known as Morse
code. It’s exactly what you’ve been looking for, even though you must now
relearn how to “write” all the letters of the alphabet.
Here’s the difference: In the system you invented, every letter of the
alphabet is a certain number of blinks, from 1 blink for A to 26 blinks
for Z. In Morse code, you have two kinds of blinks—short blinks and long
blinks. This makes Morse code more complicated, of course, but in actual
use it turns out to be much more efficient. The sentence “How are you?”
now requires only 32 blinks (some short, some long) rather than 131, and
that’s including a code for the question mark.
When discussing how Morse code works, people don’t talk about “short
blinks” and “long blinks.” Instead, they refer to “dots” and “dashes”
because that’s a convenient way of showing the codes on the printed page.
In Morse code, every letter of the alphabet corresponds to a short series of
dots and dashes, as you can see in the following table.

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