Telegraph talkers

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L.C. Hall, “Telegraph Talk and Talkers”, McClure’s Magazine, December 1901:

In its written form telegraphese , or "Morse," as it is called in the vernacular, is rarely seen. Yet as a vehicle of expression it is, to the initiated, as harmonious, subtle, and fascinating as the language of music itself.

Nothing could be simpler than its alphabet of dots and dashes. Yet it has come to pass that out of the manner of rendering this simple code has been evolved a means of communicating thought and feeling rivaling in flexibility and scope the human voice.

Some of this article's content is well known, like the fact that individual identity is communicated through a telegrapher's characteristic "fist".

But some of Hall's claims seem more like the Morse code equivalent of fish stories or war stories.

The idea of regional "accents" does seem plausible, though the section "A Rebel Betrayed by his Southern Accent" is ambiguous as to whether the intruder isrecognized as a southerner or as an individual:

A telegrapher's Morse, then, is as distinctive as his face, his tones, or his handwriting; and as difficult to counterfeit as his voice or writing. Of this individual quality of telegraphese, the old war telegraphers tell many stories. A Confederate, for example, encounters on the march a line of wire which he suspects is being used by the enemy. He taps the wire, "cuts in" his instruments, and listens. His surmise is correct; he "grounds off" one or the other end, and, trying to disguise his style of "sending," makes inquiries calculated to develop important information. But the Southern accent is recognized in his Morse by the distant manipulator, who, indeed, may have been a co-worker in the days "before the war." So the intruder gets only a good-humored chaffing. "The trick won't work, Jim ," says the Federal operator. "Let's shake for old times' sake, and then you 'git' out of this ."

Less plausible are the stories about inferring a sender's physical appearance, including clothing and accessories:

Some years ago  in a Southern office, I was assigned to a "circuit " which had its terminus at the national capital . My fellow operator at the other end of the wire used the letters "C G " for his wire-signature. C G's Morse was so clear, even, and rhythmic, his dots and dashes so perfectly timed and accurately spaced, that I immediately conceived a cordial liking for him. In a short time this liking, to which he heartily responded, ripened into a strong and sincere attachment. My friend's distinct though delicate wire-touch made working with him exceedingly restful. Indeed, every day for months I "received" from him without perceptible fatigue, or the necessity of " breaking." Almost from the beginning of our acquaintanceship I fancied that I should know him at sight if I chanced to meet him. I pictured him a tall, frail man, with the refined and patient manner of one who has suffered much, his features delicately molded, his eyes of the kind that kindle quickly when lighted by a smile, and his mouth ready to apply the torch whenever his sense of humor prompted. I fancied that I should know his dress — the old-fashioned collar; the small white tie; the thin, rather long, black sack coat.

Some months after our first meeting by wire, I was called to Washington, and while there I visited the big operating-room of the main office, in order to greet the many friends of other days. As I made my way about, I kept a sharp lookout for my old wire-friend . I did not ask to have him pointed out, because I wished to see if it were possible to identify him by my mental photograph. Presently I spied him, just as I had pictured him. I stood beside him for a moment ; then, touching his shoulder, I held out my hand.

"How do you do , C G ? I am very glad to see you and to have the pleasure of shaking your hand ."

Though he was a much older man than I, there was no lack of respect in my words, for it is not uncommon for one telegrapher to address another by his "sign."

C G rose with a quiet dignity, and taking my hand looked down at me over his glasses, his eyes beaming .

"It's H, is it not? I am very glad to meet you, my son!" And then we fell to chatting, face to face, as we had so often done by wire.

And I'm at least as skeptical of Hall's gender stereotypes:

A woman's Morse is as feminine as her voice or her handwriting. I have often put to the test my ability to distinguish between the Morse of a man and that of a woman, and only once have I been deceived.

On this same Washington "circuit" I one day encountered a sender at the other end, a stranger, who for hours "roasted " me as I seldom had been in my telegraphic experience. The dots and dashes poured from the sounder in a bewildering torrent , and I had the hardest kind of work to keep up in copying . With all its fearful swiftness the Morse was clean-clipped and musical, though it had a harsh, staccato ring which indicated a lack of sentiment and feeling in the transmitter. From this , and from a certain dash and swagger, I gathered, before the day was out, a pretty distinct impression of the personality of the transmitter. I conceived him to be of a well-kept, aggressively clean appearance, with a shining red complexion and close- cropped hair; one, in brief, whose whole manner and make-up bespoke the self-satisfied sport. That he wore a diamond in his loudly striped shirt- front I considered extremely likely, and that he carried a tooth-pick between his lips was morally certain.

Next day I took occasion to make some inquiries of my fellow-operator at Washington.

"Oh, you mean T Y, " he said, laughing . "Yes , for a girl , she is a fly sender."

It was mortifying to find that I had mistaken the sex of the sender, but I was consoled when I met the young woman. The high coloring was there, and the self-satisfied air; so also were the masculine tie, the man's vest, and the striped shirt-front. Nor were the diamond pin and the toothpick wanting. When she introduced herself by her sign, called me "Culley," and said I was a "crack-a-jack receiver," I was convinced that it was nature, and not I, that had made the mistake as to her sex.

(I'm not sure what "Culley" means here — some kind of generic name like "Jim" or "Johnnie"?)

There are lots of other interesting things in Hall's article, and some of them are even believable…

I got this article from Google Books' edition of McClure's Volume 18.

A number of other volumes of McClure's Magazine are available at the Online Books Page, Hathi Trust, Google Books, etc.

 



21 Comments

  1. Nadia R said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 1:16 pm

    "Morse fist" was the term used during World War II – idiosyncratic tapping could identify many morse operators. That information was collated as an aspect of traffic analysis.

  2. postmortes said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 1:33 pm

    As I recall, 'culley' is more normally spelled 'cully' and can mean pal, as seems likely in this story, but also a dupe or a mark.
    Overall, I am sure the writer was certain about their ability to infer someone's gender and appearance from their morse but I wonder how much of it was selective memory for when they were right….

  3. Philip Taylor said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 2:27 pm

    Although I was trained as a GPO engineer and not a GPO operator, a good grasp of Morse code was a sine qua non as we engineers communicated with each other using primarily the medium of Morse. Yet although I became competent at both sending and receiving Morse code (I gained my radio amateur's licence at the age of 16), I could never even approach the skill of my more senior colleagues in the Control Room, the best of whom were able to conduct two audio-Morse conversations simultaneously. I still have a GPO Morse key to this day, but never mastered its more modern derivative the "side-swiper".

    –· ···– – –· –·-

  4. Y said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 2:43 pm

    See cully n.¹, 5. 'a man, a fellow, a companion; often a term of address', in Green's Dictionary of Slang. The first quotation as a term of address is from 1846 (U.K.)

  5. Y said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 2:50 pm

    My nerd friend and I in 10th grade would communicate silently across the classroom by finger Morse code: tip of index touching thumb = dot, first phalanges of index and middle pressing against thumb's = dash. Until a teacher told us to stop whatever it is we are doing.

  6. Seth said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 2:56 pm

    I wonder if the conjectured male vs female sending patterns is picking up on an average difference of hand shape and related musculature, which is actually quite dimorphic. That's at least physically plausible. And a women who is particularly high in grip strength might send like a typical man.

  7. JimG ex-KA6ISE said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 11:18 pm

    @Philip Taylor:

    –· ···– – –· –·- n v t n k?

  8. Andrew Usher said,

    December 15, 2024 @ 11:58 pm

    Not impossible. But in agreement with the OP, I agree that his anecdotes must have been embellished if only by the haze of memory. As the gender one is of course really an anti-stereotype, though the language of the time may distract from that for modern readers.

    I've always found it strange that the Morse code, originally invented explicitly for machines to send and receive, ended up being used almost exclusively by humans throughout its entire history, and that it persisted for so long despite its considerable disadvantage compared to voice.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  9. Philip Taylor said,

    December 16, 2024 @ 4:53 am

    Yes, Andrew, Morse code has some disadvantages when compared to voice, but it also has many advantages, not the least of which being that when sent using (e.g.,) a torch, it can be received at a distance far beyond that at which the human voice could be heard (I once used Morse to advise a Russian warship that the rowing boat and occupant for which it was seeking had been washed up safe and sound about two miles down the coast).

  10. Jaap said,

    December 16, 2024 @ 5:05 am

    I have an old business letter from 1906, and in the printed letterhead it lists not only the 4-digit Chicago telephone number, but also the Cable address, and the code books they used. It turns out that there were published commercial code standards (e.g. Lieber, and ABC) that had short codes that were abbreviations for common sentences. I find it fascinating to see how technology was used in ways that are then completely forgotten when the technology changes.

  11. Richard Hershberger said,

    December 16, 2024 @ 5:45 am

    @Jaap There is, in the Library of Congress, a code book for transmitting baseball box scores as cheaply as possible.

  12. DaveK said,

    December 16, 2024 @ 2:42 pm

    The term “fly sender” is interesting. I was only familiar with it as a term of approbation in 1980’s Black slang. I wonder if it was a re-invention or if it could have lingered under the radar for eighty years?

  13. JimG said,

    December 16, 2024 @ 4:31 pm

    @Andrew Usher

    further to Philip Taylor's comment about Morse Code communication via blinking light, and re your comment:

    Morse Code, using a Continuous Wave radio signal transmitted by intermittent keying of short and longer tones, has CONSIDERABLE advantages over radiotelephony or digital linking (nowadays usually transmitted using single-sideband) :

    CW Morse can be transmitted with lower power and will be detectable/receivable over longer distances.
    CW Morse is detectable/receivable despite interference, even jamming, at power levels that prevent radiotelephony.
    CW Morse requires extremely narrow spectrum space, enabling communication when other communications leave no available space for radiotelephony, and CW Morse will leave spectrum space for other communications.
    CW Morse can be transmitted using very simple, even homemade, transmitters and antennas under emergency conditions when modern manufactured equipment may not be available.
    CW Morse between capable operators provides a degree of privacy or discretion in the current era. With lower transmission power and simple security practices, it can evade radiolocation and monitoring.

  14. Philip Taylor said,

    December 17, 2024 @ 7:03 am

    Jim — "–· ···– – –· –·- n v t n k ?". B@gg@r. Something in the forum interface mapped consecutive hyphens to em-dashes (the Lord preserve us from so-called "intelligent" user interfaces). I'll try again with spacing, and inter-character spaces tripled.

    – – · · · · – – – – – · – – · –

  15. Philip Taylor said,

    December 17, 2024 @ 7:04 am

    No, I give up (for today, at least).

  16. Seth said,

    December 17, 2024 @ 7:14 pm

    @Philip Taylor – were you trying to do the following :

    dash dash dot, dot dot dot dash dash, dash, dash dash dot, dash dash dot dash

    I decode that as "G3TGQ"

  17. Mark Liberman said,

    December 17, 2024 @ 7:56 pm

    Needless to say, there's source code Out There for creating Morse code audio from text: Morse code audio generation tool:

    This tool can either play morse code directly or save to a WAV file. It translates plain text from stdin or the command line. The tone frequency, words per minute, and Farnsworth timing are also configurable through command line arguments.

    However, there don't seem to be any options for encoding gender, haircuts, or mouth toothpicks.

  18. Walter Underwood said,

    December 17, 2024 @ 9:18 pm

    I've been involved in amateur radio since 1970 and I've never once heard an operators characteristic Morse rhythm called a "hand". It is always and only their "fist".

    Note this contest where there is an award for Best Fist.

    https://www.arrl.org/straight-key-night

    One distinctive style is a "swing", sometimes called a Lake Erie Swing, where the dots are much faster than the dashes. More info here:

    https://ac6v.com/morsetid.php
    https://www.kb6nu.com/does-a-swing-give-you-a-bad-fist/
    https://archive.org/details/W0bmuHowardtexHarveyW0bmu

  19. Mark Liberman said,

    December 18, 2024 @ 2:59 am

    @Walter Underwood: "I've been involved in amateur radio since 1970 and I've never once heard an operators characteristic Morse rhythm called a "hand". It is always and only their "fist"."

    You're doubtless right — I certainly don't have any signficant experience in this culture, and apparently I got the words mixed up. I've change the post to reflect your correction.

  20. Philip Taylor said,

    December 18, 2024 @ 4:56 am

    "good hand" is certainly attested :

    Don Zacherl
    Founding Partner, VICI Labs and CEO, T3 TigerTech

    Thanks Joe. My Dad learned Morse in WWII and still had a good 'hand' 10 years when he taught my Scout troop.

    ex-G3TGQ, first licenced 1963/4.

  21. Andrew Usher said,

    December 19, 2024 @ 9:11 am

    That might be a subtly different meaning, and a re-analysis is always possible because of the strangeness of 'fist', especially by someone not familiar with the jargon.

    I have to respond the the comments about code vs. voice:

    I was talking about regular practice sending over wire or radio, not things like lights where a binary code is required, or speculations about using 'homemade' equipment – what so qualifies? A microphone is certainly simpler and more easily made than a useful tube or transistor, and once you have one, AM voice isn't really much harder to implement. Of course both wouldn't measure up to usual standards.

    The meat of the comments, by JimG, then comes down to the greater efficiency and lower bandwidth requirements of CW (which are related as reception depends on power per unit bandwidth). This is true in theory, and often in practice. But one can hardly neglect the much lower speed of communication with code – 20% as much as voice would be optimistic. If one were allowed to compensate by using more power for voice, these advantages would be certainly reduced. As for bandwidth required, yes, but in practice there was not normally such a shortage of spectrum, even at frequencies as low as the old marine band. Further, taking full advantage of the lower bandwidth at higher frequencies requires a degree of frequency control that wasn't practical for much of the history of radio – the ability to tune and retain crystal-controlled stability is a relatively modern developement.

    I think the perception of advantage by him and similar people is biased by the amateur-radio environment, in which power was limiting and the available spectrum congested. Neither was of nearly as much consequence to commercial and general use.

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