Identifier: mastersofspacemo00towe (find matches)
Title: Masters of space: Morse and the telegraph; Thompson and the cable; Bell and the telephone; Marconi and the wireless telegraph; Carty and the wireless telephone;
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: Towers, Walter Kellogg, 1888-
Subjects: Morse, Samuel Finley Breese, 1791-1872 Kelvin, William Thomson, Baron, 1824-1907 Bell, Alexander Graham, 1847-1922 Marconi, Guglielmo, marchese, 1874-1937 Carty, John J. (John Joseph), 1861-1932 Telegraph Telegraph, Wireless Telephone Radio
Publisher: New York, London, Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
ry part for them-selves. The first machine was a copy of Morses model, but Vails native ability as a mechanic and his own ingenuity enabled him to make many improvements. The pencil fastened to the armature which had marked zigzag lines on the moving paper was replaced by a fountain-pen which inscribed long and short lines, and thus the dashes and dots of the Morse code were put into their present form. Morse had worked out an elaborate telegraphic code or dictionary, but a simpler code by which combinations of dots and dashes were used to represent letters instead of numbers in a code was now devised. Vail recognized the importance of having the simplest combinations of dots and dashes stand for the most used letters, as this would in-crease the speed of sending. He began to figure out for himself the frequency with which the various letters occur in the English language. Then he thought of the combination of types in a type-case, and, going to a local newspaper office, found the result all worked 72
Text Appearing After Image:
Photo by Claudy. MORSES FIRST TELEGRAPH INSTRUMENT A pen was attached to the pendulum and drawn across the strip of paper by the action of the electromagnet. The lead type shown in the lower right-hand corner was used in making electrical contact when sending a message. The modern instrument shown in the lower left-hand corner is the one that sent a message around the world in 1896. THE ACHIEVEMENT OF MORSE out for him. In each case of type such common letters as e and t have many more types than little used letters such as q and z.By observing the number of types of each letter provided, Vail was enabled to arrange them in the order of their importance in as-signing them symbols in the code. Thus the Morse code was arranged as it stands to-day.Alfred Vail played a very important part in the arrangement of the code as well as in the construction of the apparatus, and there are many who believe that the code should have been called the Vail code instead of the Morse code. Morse came down to Speed

Note About Images