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When I had one, I had it "bent" around a couple of corners and it still worked pretty good, well enough, as a matter of fact, that I carried on a weekly sked with a ham in New Zealand with it.

Keith B wrote:

jimlongley wrote:

Keith B wrote:
73 (Means best wishes in 'ham speak')

Someplace around here I have an "official" copy of the "92 Code" that lists 73 as "Best Regards."

You're right Jim, it is really 'Best Regards'. I messed it up!
However, it used to have more flowery meanings http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/history.html#73

Tx es 73,
de KE0FV

Since I had ham radio shoved down my throat as a kid, I sometimes wonder if learning Phillips' Code caused my dyslexia.

Keith B wrote:
73 (Means best wishes in 'ham speak')

Someplace around here I have an "official" copy of the "92 Code" that lists 73 as "Best Regards."

Back in the earliest days of electrical telegraph the operators used codes to shorten the messages. This was nothing new, previous telegraphers had also used codes to transfer messages while saving time and space.

One thing most people don't know is that there was telegraph before there was Morse, a Frenchman by the name of Claude Chappe developed a system of sending messages via signal flag, which was based on previous flag message systems, but Chappe added a twist, he actually established a network of towers that passed signals from one to another across parts of France, and comparatively rapidly.

Samuel F. B. Morse was a portrait artist doing a commision in europe when his young wife died. She had been buried for three weeks before he even knew she was dead. His observation of the French network (actually most of europe and England was networked by then) planted a seed that was nurtured later when he was introduced to Joseph Henry while on a trans-Atlantic cruise, and Henry told him some about how electricity worked.

Morse didn't really invent much of anything, he came up with the idea, and hired people to implement it. His biggest contribution was the concept, a crooked picture frame, and how to record the message. Heck, he didn't even develop the code, his idea was to send number groups and have the operators decode them according to a thick book. A fellow by the name of Alfred Vail did that after realizing that Morse's system was extremely cumbersome.

Eek! Did I say all that?

[/instructor]

Seriously some of my favorite subject matter.

Next time: Why do we depend on a technology that is more than 150 years old for so much - the shame of FAX.

And in the future: How Alexander Graham Bell accidentally invented the telephone while trying to do something else, and couldn't handle a little acid spill by himself.

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Presently, with the self chosen vanity call K5NRA

Licensed first in 1955, then again in 1964, and continuously since 197?