A Comparison of the Braille and Morse Codes

By

Charles Farnsworth Jr.

Graduate Student

Dominican College

Orangeburg, New York

I became interested in Braille as a result of my experience with Morse code. From my perspective as an amateur Morse code radio-telegrapher and instructor I assumed that the methods of teaching and learning Braille and Morse code would be somewhat similar. There are numerous technical similarities between Braille and Morse code, therefore it seemed appropriate to look into the historical backgrounds of both Louis Braille and Samuel F.B. Morse to determine what, if any, chronological, social or technological developments of the time may have influenced both individuals.

Morse and Braille are contemporaries of each other and although it is doubtful that they ever met personally, perhaps it is safe to say that their personalities were such that each of them possessed a highly developed intellect and were very aggressive in their approach to finding solutions to complex problems. Morse code and the Braille literary code gained international acceptance in 1844 and 1854, respectively. Each individual repeatedly faced difficult sets of circumstances and adapted successfully.

Louis Braille was blinded at age three while playing with a sharp object in his father’s saddlery shop. This eventually led to the opportunity for him to attend Valentin Hauy’s School for Blind Youth’s in Paris (Hatlen, 2000). This was a valuable opportunity for him to develop his intellectual pursuits. As there were only 14 embossed print books available for students who were blind, he quickly realized the need for an efficient and simplified literary format (“Braille,” 1978). Braille’s blindness caused him to develop the Braille literary code, as we know it today. Tragic though this was, it is reasonable to speculate that he may have become a successful maker of harnesses and saddlery in his father’s shop as an adult had he never lost his sight.

Samuel F. B. Morse aspired to become a prominent artist after graduating from Yale University in 1810. Since this was not considered to be a profitable occupation in the United States at that time, Morse embarked for England a year later to study at the Royal Academy under the guidance of American-born artists Washington Allston and Benjamin West. Although known primarily for his inventions of Morse code and the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse produced “some of the most compelling portraits in the history of American art” (Morse, 1996). It was during a shipboard voyage from England to New York in 1832 that Morse engaged in serious conversations with regard to electricity and electromagnetism and concluded, “I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance” (Morse, 1996). After several years of striving to fund his electrical experimentation with the telegraph using his artistic talent, Morse encountered such difficulty that he stopped painting altogether in 1837 (Morse, 1996).

A need for faster and more efficient communication techniques existed in both France and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Braille took the idea of a code of raised dots originally developed by French Captain Charles Barbier who called his system “night writing.” A complete elaboration of the Braille system appeared in 1837 (“Braille,” 1978). In the same year the United States Congress considered a petition to authorize a New York – New Orleans Chappe-Semaphore line. This was a non-alphabetic signaling system developed by the Frenchman Claude Chappe. It required towers to be placed at intervals of three to six miles through which visual signals were relayed during times of good visibility. This system had proven itself highly reliable in Europe where communication speed was 90 times as fast as by mounted courier (“Telegraph,” 1978). Samuel F.B. Morse obtained a grant from Congress to build the first trial telegraph line in 1843 (Morse, 1996). Since messages sent via electro-magnetic telegraph travel at the speed of light, the speed of communication became instantaneous between any two points on earth connected by telegraph wire. All other means of long distance communication suddenly became obsolete when on May 24, 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the famous message “What hath God wrought?” between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD. (“Telegraph,” 1978). In the same year Louis Braille received tribute for his writing system at the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, France. Unfortunately, the school waited until two years after Braille’s death to officially adopt his system of raised dots as their literary code for persons who were blind in 1854 (Hatlen, 2000).

Morse code reached perhaps its highest level of importance when coupled with the invention of wireless radio transmission by Gugielmo Marconi. Marconi made his first successful trans-Atlantic radio transmission from England to Canada in 1901 (Pollack and Dessapt, 2002). This development made communication possible between ship and shore radio stations on long trans-oceanic voyages. This was believed to be a tremendous improvement in the safety of trans-oceanic travel. The British luxury passenger liner Titanic made one of the first radio transmissions of the International Distress signal “S.O.S.” using Morse code after colliding with an iceberg on April 14, 1912. One ship, the Californian, was within 20 miles of the Titanic throughout that night but did not respond to the distress signal as the radio operator had shut down his equipment until the next morning. Had the Californian’s radio been operating 1,513 passengers and crew may not have perished when the Titanic sank. Fortunately, another ship, the Carpathia did respond immediately to the distress signal from a distance of 87 miles away. It took the Carpathia a little over 4 hours to cover this distance and 711 persons were rescued. Had the Titanic not been equipped with the technology to transmit Morse code by radiotelegraph, it is likely that every passenger would have perished (Pollack and Dessapt, 2002).

The Braille cell consisting of six dots has a total of 64 possible permutations. Hence, most dot patterns have come to be used for multiple purposes primarily in the format known as contracted Braille. Multiple rules are necessary for the correct usage of contractions. Besides the alphabet, punctuation, numbers, composition signs and other special symbols, the code has been extended over time to include 189 contractions (Durre, 1996). Usage of contracted Braille enables accomplished Braille readers to read literary works at high speed as well as minimizing the number of Braille characters used in the transcription of a printed document. Morse code consists of 54 basic characters for sending and receiving messages in English. The alphabet consists of dot and dash patterns of between one and six characters. All punctuation marks consist of six characters, and numbers are five characters in length. Space saving is accomplished in Morse code by the use of formal and informal short-form letter combinations. There are 234 formal short-form letter combinations called “Q” signals consisting of three letters (“Q” Signals, 2001). For instance, a radio operator sending the letter combination “QTH” would either be making a statement or asking a question; “my geographical location is ____” or “what is your geographical location?” If the “Q” signal is followed by a question mark, the transmission is interpreted as a question. If no question mark is sent then the “Q” signal is interpreted as a statement (Cleveland-Iliffe, J. and Smith, G.R., 1995). The number of informal short-form letter combinations is too numerous to count. If I wished to refer to my wife in Morse code I would use the letter combination “XYL” which means “x-young lady”. Conversely, my wife could refer to me as her “OM” which means “old man.”

Samuel F. B. Morse envisioned a system in which a Morse code signal would be instantaneously changed to it’s alphabetic or numeric equivalent and embossed on a piece of paper (“Telegraph,” 1978). Since this method posed insurmountable technical difficulties, Morse abandoned it to rely initially upon a receiver that embossed the coded symbols of dots and dashes in a straight line on an unwinding band of paper (“Telegraph,” 1978). A telegraph operator could then read the coded pattern from the paper in a method similar to the tactual reading of a brailled text. Eventually, it became faster and more efficient for telegraph operators to write down messages as they were received audibly. By 1856, this development made the embossing receiver obsolete. The much simpler “sounder” is still used today for sending and receiving messages in Morse code (“Telegraph,” 1978).

As an accredited examiner for the Amateur Radio Service of Industry Canada I have offered courses in radio-electronics and Morse code to high school students since 1993. While taking a graduate course in special education in the summer of 2002 I was exposed to the Braille literary code, which seemed to have many things in common with Morse code. I felt that my proficiency in Morse code would give me an advantage in learning Braille and very soon thereafter enrolled in a graduate program for teachers of visually impaired students at Dominican College in Blauvelt, New York. The course in literary Braille was a distance program in which I was required to follow the order of lessons as put forth in the Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing prepared by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (Risjord, Wilkinson, and Stark 2000). I was in regular contact via Internet with my Braille instructor at Dominican College for the 15-week duration of the course from September through December 2002. I spent a similar interval of 13 weeks developing my proficiency in Morse code in the spring of 1992 and was anxious to learn whether or not I could develop a similar level of proficiency in literary Braille over the same period of time. During the first few lessons the primary focus was on learning uncontracted Braille. This was fairly easy to accomplish by taping numbers on each of the braillewriter keys to develop a familiarity with the alphabet, numbers, and punctuation symbols and by keeping in mind which sequence of keys to press to create each individual character. However, once the contracted format was introduced including all of the rules that govern its usage, this technique greatly hindered my progress. In each succeeding lesson more contractions and rules were introduced, thereby compounding the difficulty. It occurred to me that in order to master contracted Braille I needed to become extremely proficient in uncontracted Braille. More specifically, it was necessary to gradually reduce my dependence on the numbers taped to the keys. To accomplish this goal, it was important to be able to Braille each and every character without looking at the keys and without thinking about the number sequence of the keys. I deliberately stopped working with the contracted format for a two-week interval and completely transcribed a children’s book into uncontracted Braille. At the completion of this process I removed the numbers from the keys on the braillewriter and was able to successfully complete the lessons involving fully contracted literary Braille.

The process just described in learning the Braille code parallels a sequence sometimes experienced in learning Morse code. Morse characters consist of a number of short and long sounds known as “dits” and “dahs.” In order to achieve proficiency in sending and receiving Morse code it is important to avoid the pitfall of counting the number of “dits” and “dahs” for each character. This means of learning Morse code has the unfortunate result of restricting an operator to a maximum sending and receiving speed of about 10 words per minute. Morse operators commonly refer to this condition as the “10 words per minute barrier.” The best way to avoid this is to train the ear to recognize the characters instantaneously in the same manner used in listening to and speaking language. In this way a telegraph operator can quickly reach sending and receiving speeds of 20 or more words per minute, which is a fairly comfortable and efficient rate of speed for this medium of information transfer.

At the conclusion of the 13-week training period in which I learned Morse code, it was possible for me to achieve sending and receiving speeds in excess of 15 words per minute. Most of my students have had similar results. Having never experienced the “10 words per minute barrier” in Morse code training, I wondered why I had encountered a similar “barrier” in developing proficiency in Braille. In learning Morse code my students and I had one significant factor in common in that we used a “shareware” computer program available on the Internet called “Supermorse.” This program developed by Lee Murrah of Bloomfield, Missouri makes use of the “Farnsworth” method of learning Morse code (Murrah, 2002). The Farnsworth name is attached to this method because of the association with radio operator Russ Farnsworth who produced a recorded Morse code learning program in 1959 (Pierpont, 1998).

The Farnsworth method is based upon experiments in psychology, which have proven that “if a stimulus can be grasped as a single unit, a wholeness or “Gestalt,” learning will take place at a rapid rate” (Pierpont, 1998). The radiotelegraph operator does not recognize letters as so many dots and dashes. He or she hears and learns to recognize each letter as a combination of sounds in much the same manner as children learn to read words by sounds instead of by learning to spell them” (Kendall and Koehler, 1923). A novice is exposed to each Morse character at speeds of 12 to 18 words per minute with long intervals of space inserted between them which are gradually shortened over time. I have found this technique to be highly effective in Morse code training, especially since the “Supermorse” program gives immediate feedback on the degree of proficiency achieved in each lesson.