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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY He never had need for code By HANK HENRY "The United States Navy will discontinue sending messages in Morse code after more than 90 years of use." (News item July 1999) You learn a lot of things when you are in the military, most of which cannot be translated into a civilian job. In my case, I became a trained Morse code operator. After 10 weeks of study and practice, I was finally able to both send and receive messages at the minimum rate required. The American who was credited at the time with the invention of sending messages by dots and dashes was Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1852). Morse was first an artist, a painter who graduated from Yale in 1810, but he also became interested in electricity during his undergraduate days. He apparently used both sides of his brain. To satisfy his interest in art, he studied painting in Europe and achieved some success. He also became interested in electricity in 1832, when he learned of the Frenchman Andre Ampere's idea for the electric telegraph. Morse worked for 12 years to perfect his own ideas of what a telegraph should be. So many people in Europe were working on similar projects that many questioned Morse's claim that he invented telegraphy. Doubters also observed that his code of dots and dashes was similar to other codes of the time. But Morse was a publicity hound. In 1844, he demonstrated his invention before Congress by sending the phrase "What hath God wrought?" from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. Seventy years would pass before the invention of radio would allow ships at sea to communicate by sending each other strings of dots and dashes. My exposure to Morse code came in 1943, when I was assigned to the Marine Corps radio school in San Diego. Since early in this century, the Navy and Marines had used Morse code as the primary method for communicating between headquarters in Washington and ships at sea and troops in the field. We students spent almost every waking hour struggling to learn what those dots and dashes were all about. The quality of the equipment certainly improved over the years. The first telegraph key looked something like one of today's small hand staplers. Press the top of the device and you heard a tone. Later, a high-speed key was invented. It was actually two sending keys mounted back to back -- one for the dots, the other for the dashes. The operator used thumb and forefinger. Skilled operators could send messages about as fast as a competent typist. The Marines were taught the code in "full-immersion" style -- eight to 10 hours a day of nothing but code. And it must have sunk in -- I can still understand much of a telegraphed message on short wave. But I used Morse code only once during the rest of the war. The radios I operated in the field easily transmitted voice communications throughout the islands. Larger radio facilities at shore stations and on ships could send Morse code messages around the world. Our voice transmissions were fine for battle conditions on the relatively small Pacific islands. After the war ended, my division was hurriedly sent to North China to take the regional surrender of the Japanese. There was an impressive ceremony in a park in Tsingtao (now Qingdao) that must have been half a mile across. There were more than 5,000 troops in our division, and the Japanese assembled a like number. It was several weeks after the official end of the war, but the Japanese were still in uniform and armed with rifles and pistols. Shortly before our division reached Tsingtao, the Chinese Communists resumed printing a newspaper in English. The paper had only four pages, with no pictures, but it had a wide readership among the Americans and 250,000 European and White Russian exiles who lived there. This paper received its news courtesy of the U.S. Navy's powerful shortwave station in San Francisco, which broadcast in Morse code that could be received in China. Twice a day the navy station would send a 15-minute newscast in code that the three typists at the newspaper would faithfully copy. I was told that none of them knew English well, but it really didn't matter. A good code operator only needed to get the dots and dashes and pauses down. He didn't need to know the language he was copying. The only time I used Morse code after leaving the school was on Guam, when we had a practice session one Saturday morning after the fighting ended. I still don't know why they spent all that money instructing us on something we would never use. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA