Dear editor
The first message in the Morse code of dots and stripes sent long distance travelled from Washington to Baltimore on Friday, May 23, 1844, 175 years ago. It was the first time in the history of mankind that complex thoughts were communicated between distant places almost instantaneously.

Until then, there had to be face-to-face conversation, messages coded by drums, smoke signals and optical telegraph systems, or reading printed words.

Thanks to Samuel Morse, the communication changed rapidly, and since then it has continued to change faster and faster. Morse invented the electric telegraph in 1832. Then it took another six years to normalise a code to be able to communicate through telegraphic cables. In 1843, the United States Congress granted him US$30,000 to lay a cable between the capital of the country and neighbouring Baltimore. When the line was finished, the inventor made a public demonstration of long-distance communication.
Morse was not the only one who worked to develop a way to communicate through the telegraph, but it is the only one that has survived. The cables, magnets and keys used in the initial demonstration have given way to the touch screens of mobile phones, but the Morse code has remained essentially the same, and in the 21st century, perhaps to the surprise of some, it retains its relevance.

The key idea of ??Morse, when developing his code, was to take into account how often each letter is used in English. The most common ones have shorter symbols. The “e”, which is the one that appears most often, is represented by a period. On the contrary, the letter “z”, which is the least used in English, was represented by the much longer and more complex “dot-dot-dot (pause) dot”.

After the shipwreck of the Titanic in 1912, an international agreement forced some ships to designate a person to be permanently listening for distress signals by radio. That same agreement established that “SOS” – “dot-dot-dot stripe-stripe-stripe dot-dot-dot” – would be the international distress signal, not as an abbreviation of anything, but because it was a simple pattern, easy to remember and to transmit. The coast guard suspended the monitoring in 1995, and in 1999 the obligation of the ships to monitor the entry of distress signals was suppressed. Despite this, the US Navy continues to teach at least some sailors to read, send and receive Morse code.

As its signals are so simple, the Morse code can also be used with flashing lights. Many naval forces around the world use this kind of lights to communicate from ship to ship. The first message transmitted in code by Morse said the following: “What God has done”. It is a passage from the book Numbers (Bible), chapter 22, verse 22.

The same day, in Shiraz, in Persia, today Iran, Siyyid Ali Muhammad, declared His mission as Messenger of God for our time, and becoming known as The Báb. He inaugurated a prophetic cycle that will last 5,000 centuries – 500,000 years. The Báb (1819-1850), besides being the founder of a world religion, was also the precursor of the coming of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, and who came to teach that there is one God, one religion (which is taught by God in stages through His messengers from time to time) and one single humanity.

Regards
Rooplall Dudhnath