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From: mtxinu!nath.la.locus.com!marc@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Marc Kwiatkowski)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Riposte to Morse Credits by Asimov in Digest
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Date: 31 Aug 90 22:37:28 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 628, Message 9 of 14


In article <11529@accuvax.nwu.edu> 0004133373@MCIMail.com (Donald E.
Kimberlin) writes:

>Even the so-called "Morse Code" was not Morse's invention, but that of
>his shopworker subordinate named Vail (probably an ancestor of the
>Vail of AT&T fame).  Morse was, in fact, an arrogant, foppish son of
>a rich man who frequently took long yacht trips and sessions painting
>in oils, leaving Vail to do the work.  Morse's idea of the
>"instrument" to send telegraph signals was a cumbersome,
>piano-keyboard-like thing he called a "portrule," on which one set up
>the character to send, then pressed on a long lever for it to send the
>pulses to line.  During one period of Morse's absence, Vail gave up on
>trying to manufacture a portrule that would work, and instead made a
>"key" like the one we have all seen, including a means to use it for
>transmission ... the code.

I haven't heard of the portrule before, but in the SAMS book "Digital
Communications", author Campbell states that the earliest Morse
receivers were much like siesmographs, that is, a drum with paper
about it that rotated at a fix rate, while a pencil dragged across it
and went high for the duration of the pulse.  If I remember correctly,
the protocol of generating a pulse followed by a long gap, would
produce a MARK and a SPACE on the drum, the terms endured, but the
device did not.  Operators learned to simply hear Morse code by
listening to the pencil motions.


marc@locus.com