Overview
In 1836, Samuel Morse showed off the ability of a telegraph system to share information wirelessly. The information was sent as a series of on and off tones, lights, or clicks that could be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment, the most commonly used form of the Morse code was sent as a series of electrical signals. Short signals are represented as dots and are referred to as dits. Long signals are represented as dashes and referred to as dahs.(The website WRV museum (2011). Each character is represented by a unique sequence of dots and dashes. The duration of a dash is three times the duration of a dot. Each dot or dash is followed by a short silence, equal to the dot duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space equal to three dots, and the words are separated by a space equal to seven dots. The dot duration is the basic unit of time measurement in code transmission.
Creative response
The creative response I have produced is a series of journal entries on the final transmissions to and from the Titanic. While reading these entries you will learn about what happened on that so called “fatal night” (Wilkinson, 2011, p. 38) by the telegraph operators John Gorge Phillips and his assistant Harold Sidney Bride, the transmissions that are in the journal are “the final transmissions” (Wilkinson, 2011, p. 64) that the titanic ever sent and received. The way I have created this Journal is by re-writing old transmissions to and from the Titanic on April 15- 16 in 1912. I started by translating all of the transmissions into Morse code and then setting the book up as if it was written as a journal kept by Harold Sidney Bride or John Gorge Phillips. The journal too a very long time to write due to the fact that when writing Morse code you must be very careful not to mess up the letter you are writing. After I finished writing the Morse code I would translate it into English so that anyone who read it would understand.
Complications
While making my creative response I somehow managed to lose the original and when writing the creative response and have it completely deleted from my computer it was not a good situation to be in for a time that was my two major complications. Even though I thought it was a good idea to do the journals it took me ages.
Sources
My primary source is a book called The Story of the Unsinkable Titanic (Wilkinson, 2011) which gave me a lot of information on the topic of the telegraph operators and what happened on the titanic also information on Samuel Morse and how he invented the Morse code system. My secondary sources (Princeton University) are websites which have supplied extensive information on Morse Code, Samuel Morse, The Final Transmissions, The Operators and the telegraph system itself. My primary source of information was not as useful as I would’ve hoped, it lacked some information that was critical to the assignment, so I used secondary sources to expand my knowledge of the topic and they contributed greatly to the creative response and rational.
Significance
The significance of the invention of Morse code through my creative response which demonstrates how Morse code was not only used for emergency messages but also and its creator in history is that Morse code revolutionized communications throughout the world, and Samuel Morse played a major role in this revolution. After the telegraph, communication no longer