Google Celebrates Inventor of Morse Code

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otta love Google’s daily commemorative graphic.  The Google logo ends up being decorated on days the company has chosen to celebrate certain special occasions.  Today’s theme: the birthday of Samuel Morse – inventor of the Morse code, which of course was responsible for the popularization of electronically-transmitted information.

“Morse code uses a standardized sequence of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a given message…The speed of Morse code is measured in words per minute (WPM) or characters per minute, while fixed-length data forms of telecommunication transmission are usually measured in baud or bps. Originally created for Samuel F. B. Morse’s electric telegraph in the early 1840s, Morse code was also extensively used for early radio communication beginning in the 1890s. For the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of high-speed international communication was conducted in Morse code, using telegraph lines, undersea cables, and radio circuits. However, the variable length of the Morse characters made it hard to adapt to automated circuits, so for most electronic communication it has been replaced by machine readable formats, such as Baudot code and ASCII. “

          — Source: Wikipedia.org

Lotsa familiar terms in that article, for those of us who work in the information technology field.  Baudot and ASCII, in particular.  Although the article doesn’t explicitly say so, I’ve long-suspected the term “baud”, used to refer to a modem’s speed (i.e. “baud rate”) was a direct reference to Baudot code.

So maybe Google has it right – and there should be a special day set aside for a man who influenced the world so radically.