A History of Morse Code
Morse code is a character encoding system that represents letters and numbers as sequences of short (dot, ·) and long (dash, –) signals. It was developed in the 1830s by Samuel F.B. Morse and Alfred Vail for use with the electric telegraph — the first telecommunications technology to span continents.
The code was designed with letter frequency in mind: the most common English letters received the shortest codes. E (the most frequent letter) is a single dot (·). T (the second most frequent) is a single dash (–). This minimized transmission time for typical messages.
Morse code transmitted across the first transatlantic cable in 1858, enabled naval coordination in both World Wars, and remained the international maritime distress standard (SOS: · · · – – – · · ·) until 1999. It is still used by amateur radio operators and in emergency beacons.