From artificial intelligence drones to hypersonic missiles, the modern battlefield is packed with all the latest technology. But among these, one technology that is hundreds of years old still holds equal importance – and that is: Morse code.
Chord lines of different tones, which a railroad worker would have understood just by sight more than a hundred and fifty years ago, are still being used by the Russian military in the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Even today, however, some people are able to identify Morse code by hearing the distinct sounds, especially the most familiar form, three short, three big, three short again (…—…), which basically means an SOS or emergency message. .
Currently, Russian bombers send their messages via Morse code to the main control center or Russian Navy ships of the Baltic Fleet send messages to their headquarters on land.
Various ham radio stations use the shortwave band to make very similar beeps, known to hobbyists as “dits” (.) and “dahs” (-), to laypeople as dots and dashes.
Even today, detectives use the shortwave band on radios to tune in to various secret stations that broadcast in Morse code.
Morse code was invented in the 19th century
But in our changing world, why is a technology that was first invented in the 19th century still being used today?
The first reason is that Morse code was not invented by an engineer or technician but by a common man who made a living by drawing pictures. Samuel Morse initially designed the teleprinter, a device that printed text on paper.
Morse then engaged Alfred Weil to work on it in more detail, whose interest, however, revolved around various instruments. He then invented the symbolic dots and dashes and the idea of communicating information through words came from his head.
Initially, however, sound was used only for connection testing. Before long Morse and Vail realized that printing was not practical. So when they added words to it, they couldn’t have imagined what a wonderful and effective way of communication they had come up with.
The real thing about Morse code is its sounds, which create a lot of rhythm. That is why it has many similarities with music. And it has been found that musically gifted people can learn Morse code quickly.
Morse code enhances our ability to recognize different patterns by enhancing our ability to understand internal rhythms.
This technique lies dormant in our brains and is very useful in recovering incomplete messages.
However, Morse code users sometimes receive incomplete information due to unnecessary noise, mechanical errors, poor connections, and intrusions.
Neurologically, Morse code has a peculiarity, which can be compared to “reading by ear”, and sending and receiving something is actually more like speaking than written messages.
Another aspect of Morse code is that it is a very general technology. Anyone with some basic technical knowledge can build their own transmitter by putting together all the readily available tools.
And the signal transmitted by the Morse transmitter is also very small and only requires a bandwidth of 100-150 Hz (whereas normal speech requires 2500-3000 Hz).
This means that the receiver of the message is able to use a small filter to remove the extraneous noise that comes from the outside at different stages of the message arrival.
And what makes it most efficient is that it can travel long distances using little electricity.
In 1956, radio amateurs showed that 78 kilowatts of power was sufficient to send something from Massachusetts to Denmark. Which is only one tenth of the electricity that an LED lamp uses. And many people start their mornings with coffee from the coffee maker, which uses about a thousand times more electricity than that.
This technical simplicity and tremendous effectiveness came in handy during World War II, with combat troops and Allied commandos using their portable Morse transceivers to communicate with London from inside German-occupied territory.
It was very risky though, as the Germans were always getting caught in all sorts of waves. Those ignorant of Morse code would not have caught on, and Morse code would not have added any additional security.
But now anyone without any training is able to retrieve messages sent by Morse code with a software. But any message can be made secure by encrypting it before sending it, which Vail proposed as early as 1845.
And the most secure way to encrypt or bring messages into symbolic and secret codes is a “one-time pad,” just a pen and paper.
A “one-time pad” is a concatenation of different characters, which is repeated as long as the message needs to be encrypted.
The sender itself uses a pad to encrypt, while the receiver uses a copy of the same pad to decode the message or recover its meaning (it only has these two copies and must destroy them immediately after use).
As long as a notebook is not being used again, it is theoretically still secret, even with the most advanced technology. However, generating sequences using random letters or symbols is really difficult.
Even with all the great and modern digital communication tools being added these days, the simple and effective combination of Morse code has yet to be surpassed, and it has sustained this method of message exchange for over a hundred and fifty years.