2666: Why 'Morse' Code Apr 5, 2022

Samuel Morse is known for inventing Morse code, but that was not particular to him. He and Alfred Vail developed the electrical telegraph system that would initially place the dots and dashes on a paper tape at the other end of the wire, though operators found listening to the clicks to be more efficient. That said, Morse's original idea for a system was to transmit the dots-&-dashes as numbers only, and to have a system for interpreting the numbers as words. Alfred Vail was the one who came up with the idea of encoding letters through those dots-&-dashes, and worked out the relative frequencies of each to make the system the most efficient with shorter codes for more common letters. Arguably, given the great mechanical and cypher-based contributions, it might have been more fittingly Vail code.