Commercial Use of Morse Code Ends

By CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Canadian coast guardsman Kevin Layton remembers using Morse code to talk a ship's crew off Hawaii through a medical emergency. Former U.S. radioman Ed Brady recalls dots and dashes coming from a ship that hit ice en route to Denmark until it sank, all hands lost.

``So distinctive,'' Brady says of the distress signal SOS, for generations Morse code's chilling call for help from seafarers. ``It just registers.''

Now it's consigned to a storied past.

Months after the code was abandoned under international convention for ships in trouble, the only private U.S. network of coastal radio stations using Morse has turned off the transmitters.

With that, mariners and Morse practitioners say, a long antiquated but still eminently reliable form of communication has ended in U.S. commerce.

A final ceremonial message was tapped out last week to Washington, where the first such message originated 155 years ago. On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse's question, ``What hath God wrought?'' pulsed along 35 miles of steel wire to Baltimore.

Simple but slow, the telegraph was overtaken decades ago by the telephone, by data systems capable of reproducing printed words at the receiving end, and by satellite for most forms of communication.

But until the newest generation of satellite and computer technology took hold, Morse code endured for mariners.

Now e-mail is within easy reach for many at sea and modern ships have automated emergency beacons designed to allow rescuers to zero in on them.

``Morse code has finally met its match,'' says Tim Gorman, operations director for Globe Wireless, the company that dropped the curtain on commercial radiotelegraphy by ceasing transmissions at its four stations in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Slidell, La.

Last week the World War II-era Liberty ship Jeremiah O'Brien, docked in San Francisco harbor, transmitted a Morse farewell to President Clinton. ``History is made on this day as we embark on a new era of communication,'' it began.

The message was translated back into English and sent to the White House the modern way, via e-mail.

It was acknowledged with an automated e-mail response from the White House, no hands on deck.

The International Maritime Organization officially phased out Morse code Feb. 1 for ships in peril, replacing it with the high-tech Global Maritime Distress and Safety System.

The U.S. Coast Guard ceased Morse operations several years ago and no longer monitors radio frequencies used for the code. But Brady, now in the Coast Guard's communications office, says it will respond if it happens to hear that infamous, now archaic, dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, meaning SOS.

``There's no government facility listening,'' he said. And now with the loss of the radio stations, there is ``nobody privately listening,''

Morse experts say the stations, KFS, KPH, WCC and WNU, were the last commercial radiotelegraph operations in North America. They continue to beam shipping information, news and weather to ships at sea as part of the larger Globe Wireless network using satellites and high-frequency radio.

The technology now considered a tortoise was an astonishing hare in its time.

``Information will be literally winged with the rapidity of lightning,'' the Baltimore weekly Niles National Register reported after Samuel Morse made his historic transmission. Space and time were ``annihilated.''

The invention eventually ended the age of news dissemination by pony express, steamer and courier pigeon.

The Associated Press, formed four years after Morse's demonstration, rose on the strength of the expanding telegraph as information that once took days or weeks to go from city to city sped to its destination in minutes.

Reports from the Civil War, greetings between distant relatives, dispatches on market prices in far-off places - all could be sent in the time it took to reach the telegraph office. At first it consisted of clicks; later, tones. An international Morse code was developed that was more suitable for foreign languages.

Radiotelegraphy penetrated the wildest tempests.

``We have seen and heard reports that when a ship gets into a bad storm and gets into trouble, the first thing to go is satellite communications,'' said Layton, of the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which monitors busy North Atlantic sea lanes.

``Morse code was right there 'til the ship flipped under the water.''

Morse continues to be used in poorer parts of the world and is popular with ham radio enthusiasts. U.S. naval ships seeking silent communication still use the code with flashing lights.

Another vestige remains, although those who practice it are surely oblivious.

The rhythmic beat by fans in sports arenas - dum-dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum - is Morse code for the numbers 7 and 3. By telegraphers' shorthand, 73 means best wishes.