Operation Just Cause... ...for as long as it takes
By Calvin Woodward WASHINGTON (AP) _ Canadian coast guardsman Kevin Layton
remembers using Morse code to talk a ship's crew off Hawaii through
a medical emergency. Former U.S. radioman Ed Brady recalls dots and
dashes coming from a ship that hit ice en route to Denmark until it
sank, all hands lost.
``So distinctive,'' Brady says of the distress signal SOS, for
generations Morse code's chilling call for help from seafarers.
``It just registers.''
Now it's consigned to a storied past.
Months after the code was abandoned under international
convention for ships in trouble, the only private U.S. network of
coastal radio stations using Morse has turned off the transmitters.
With that, mariners and Morse practitioners say, a long
antiquated but still eminently reliable form of communication has
ended in U.S. commerce.
A final ceremonial message was tapped out last week to
Washington, where the first such message originated 155 years ago.
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse's question, ``What hath God
wrought?'' pulsed along 35 miles of steel wire to Baltimore.
Simple but slow, the telegraph was overtaken decades ago by the
telephone, by data systems capable of reproducing printed words at
the receiving end, and by satellite for most forms of
communication.
But until the newest generation of satellite and computer
technology took hold, Morse code endured for mariners.
Now e-mail is within easy reach for many at sea and modern ships
have automated emergency beacons designed to allow rescuers to zero
in on them.
``Morse code has finally met its match,'' says Tim Gorman,
operations director for Globe Wireless, the company that dropped
the curtain on commercial radiotelegraphy by ceasing transmissions
at its four stations in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Slidell, La.
Last week the World War II-era Liberty ship Jeremiah O'Brien,
docked in San Francisco harbor, transmitted a Morse farewell to
President Clinton. ``History is made on this day as we embark on a
new era of communication,'' it began.
The message was translated back into English and sent to the
White House the modern way, via e-mail.
It was acknowledged with an automated e-mail response from the
White House, no hands on deck.
The International Maritime Organization officially phased out
Morse code Feb. 1 for ships in peril, replacing it with the
high-tech Global Maritime Distress and Safety System.
The U.S. Coast Guard ceased Morse operations several years ago
and no longer monitors radio frequencies used for the code. But
Brady, now in the Coast Guard's communications office, says it will
respond if it happens to hear that infamous, now archaic, dot dot
dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot, meaning SOS.
``There's no government facility listening,'' he said. And now
with the loss of the radio stations, there is ``nobody privately
listening,''
Morse experts say the stations, KFS, KPH, WCC and WNU, were the
last commercial radiotelegraph operations in North America. They
continue to beam shipping information, news and weather to ships at
sea as part of the larger Globe Wireless network using satellites
and high-frequency radio.
The technology now considered a tortoise was an astonishing hare
in its time.
``Information will be literally winged with the rapidity of
lightning,'' the Baltimore weekly Niles National Register reported
after Samuel Morse made his historic transmission. Space and time
were ``annihilated.''
The invention eventually ended the age of news dissemination by
pony express, steamer and courier pigeon.
The Associated Press, formed four years after Morse's
demonstration, rose on the strength of the expanding telegraph as
information that once took days or weeks to go from city to city
sped to its destination in minutes.
Reports from the Civil War, greetings between distant relatives,
dispatches on market prices in far-off places _ all could be sent
in the time it took to reach the telegraph office. At first it
consisted of clicks; later, tones. An international Morse code was
developed that was more suitable for foreign languages.
Radiotelegraphy penetrated the wildest tempests.
``We have seen and heard reports that when a ship gets into a
bad storm and gets into trouble, the first thing to go is satellite
communications,'' said Layton, of the Canadian Coast Guard in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, which monitors busy North Atlantic sea lanes.
``Morse code was right there 'til the ship flipped under the
water.''
Morse continues to be used in poorer parts of the world and is
popular with ham radio enthusiasts. U.S. naval ships seeking silent
communication still use the code with flashing lights.
Another vestige remains, although those who practice it are
surely oblivious.
The rhythmic beat by fans in sports arenas, dum-dum,
dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum, is Morse code for the
numbers 7 and 3. By telegraphers' shorthand, 73 means best wishes.
Associated Press Writer
