Inventions & Discoveries · Communication and computing

Morse code

c. 1837 · 19th century · Also known as American Morse code, International Morse code

Morse code is a method of telecommunication that encodes letters, numerals and punctuation as standard sequences of two signal durations, dots and dashes. Around 1837 the American artist Samuel Morse devised a code of numerals for the electrical telegraph he was developing with Joseph Henry and Alfred Vail; in 1840 Vail extended it to letters, giving the shortest signs to the commonest ones, and this code was first used in 1844. Friedrich Gerke's simpler Hamburg alphabet of 1848, adopted in Germany and Austria in 1851, led to the International Morse code of 1865, which also carried early radio communication from the 1890s.

Morse code
Image: Hp.Baumeler · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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First known
c. 1837
Where
United States
Credited to
Samuel Morse · Alfred Vail

NoteThe alphabet that carries Morse's name was Alfred Vail's, who extended Morse's numerals-only design in 1840, and most of the present international code comes from Friedrich Gerke's revision of 1848.

Built onElectrical telegraph1816

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See also

Cite this entry
APA
The Epoch Institute. (2026). Morse code. In The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/morse-code
MLA
“Morse code.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/morse-code. Accessed .
Chicago
The Epoch Institute. “Morse code.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/morse-code.
Harvard
The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘Morse code’, The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/morse-code (Accessed: ).

Last reviewed October 2026Random entry ↻