A Brief History

Morse code was developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail between 1837 and 1844 as a way to transmit messages over electric telegraph lines. The first official telegram — "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT" — was sent by Morse on May 24, 1844, from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.

The code was rapidly adopted by railroads for coordinating train movements and by maritime services for ship-to-shore communication. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized the system as International Morse Code, and it remained the primary long-distance communication method until the rise of voice radio and digital communications. Today, Morse code continues in use by amateur (ham) radio operators, accessibility tools for people with motor impairments, and emergency signaling (SOS: ... --- ...).

How It Works

Each character is encoded as a sequence of dots (dits) and dashes (dahs). A dot is the basic unit of time; a dash is three dot-lengths. Within a character, symbols are separated by one dot-length of silence.

• Letter gap: 1 space between Morse sequences (e.g., .- -... = AB)
• Word gap: / or two or more consecutive spaces separates words
• Separators: This decoder also accepts | and , as word boundaries
• Invalid tokens: Unrecognised sequences are shown in brackets, e.g. [......]
• Mixed input: Lines containing non-Morse characters are passed through verbatim

Morse Code Reference