A pointer to the classic Hancock episode, ‘The Radio Ham’.
Painfully hilarious!
Category: History
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The creator of the Continental code
Friedrich Clemens Gerke I stumbled on to a page on Wikipedia about Friedrich Clemens Gerke, (22 Jan 1801 – 21 May 1888) the man responsible for simplifying Vail and Morse’s original telegraphic code.
As the wikipedia article explains, “The original Morse code consisted of four different hold durations (the amount of time the key was held down), and some letters contained inconsistent internal durations of silence. In Gerke’s system there are only “dits” and “dahs”, the latter being three times as long as the former, and the internal silence intervals are always a single dit-time each.”
This chart reveals the logic behind his reform of the code.
Gerke’s tree chart of letter codes After some minor changes it was standardised at the International Telegraphy congress in Paris in 1865.
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Morse Alive!
Great BBC story on morse code from 2008, mentioned on the FT817 email list by Joe WB7VTY:
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Samuel Morse’s 219th birthday
Samuel Morse was born 219 years ago. But of course credit for devising the code that bears Morse’s name goes to his assistant (machinist & inventor) Alfred Vail. His birthday is 25th September 1807.
A replica of the key built by Alfred Vail as an improvement on Samuel Morse’s original ‘transmitter’. -
International Marconi Day
Today is International Marconi Day. He was born on this day in 1874 in Bologna.
Guglielmo Marconi in Newfoundland for the transatlantic tests on 12 December 1901 -
Ham Radio’s Technical Culture
Kristen Haring’s book “Ham Radio’s Technical Culture” Kristen Haring’s book “Ham Radio’s Technical Culture” is a fascinating coverage of an activity that gets precious little coverage in the mainstream.
“”Although approximately one million Americans operated ham radios in the course of the 20th century, very little has been written about this thriving technical culture in our midst. Kristen Haring offers a deeply sympathetic history of this under-appreciated technical community and their role in contributing to American advances in science and technology, especially the electronics industry. In the process she reveals how technical tinkering has defined manhood in the United States and has powerfully constituted ‘technical identities’ with often utopian, even, at times, revolutionary, notions about the social uses of technology.”
Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, and author of “Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination”