Main menu
The Morse instructors were mainly former World War 2 wireless operators of one sort or another and they were, initially, as sceptical about the new system as we students. Each punched tape lasted for a mind-
Reading ahead in a plain language Morse message and guessing what the next letter might be was absolutely verboten. If you missed a letter due to interference or a momentary lapse of concentration, it was tempting to guess what it might have been by the context. We were told that operationally this was totally unacceptable because the originator of the message, unknown to whoever might receive the message, might have deliberately misspelled a word for security reasons or as part of a cipher. Towards the end of our training, when our instructors reverted to sending the code manually instead of by machine, they would occasionally misspell words deliberately, or introduce grammatical errors, to catch out any of us who had been tempted to read ahead. A missed letter counted as one error, but a wrong letter counted as two, and a few of those made all the difference between a pass and a fail.
At speeds above about 20 words per minute there was no longer any time to make corrections anyway. If you had second thoughts about what a character might have been, spending time thinking about it merely meant that you missed the next few characters. Worrying about characters you had completely missed also meant that you missed the next few and so on.
There were two curious aspects to writing down Morse sent at more than 22 wpm, which I and several others on the course used to ponder. We found that when writing down plain language texts our writing lagged the transmission by anything up to six characters. This seemed to make it easier to join the letters together into written words. This had nothing to do with the forbidden practice of ‘reading ahead’: in fact it was 'writing behind', the hand holding the pencil lagging behind what the brain had heard. This led to the second curious aspect. I found that after receiving a long passage of high speed Morse code, I had not the least idea of the content of that passage. In other words, as I used to say, ‘the Morse wrote itself down without any help from me!’ Some of our eastern European instructors used to lapse into a variety of foreign languages in the middle of a passage of English (including a sprinkling of accented letters which we did not recognise) and I was not always aware of this until the end of the test when I had time to read over what I had written and found that I had a number of blanks where the unfamiliar letters had been transmitted. One of our instructors was a former Polish Air Force signaller and when he lapsed into Polish Morse there was absolutely no way we could have read that ahead!! (We used to get our own back by cheekily pointing out that his pronunciation of English left a lot to be desired!)
There is little reason to learn Morse these days and it is quite difficult to find Morse radio transmissions on the short waves, apart from dedicated radio amateurs. (I used to be GM3MEX when I was stationed at RAF Kinloss, Scotland, in 1957, and ZB1LQ when I was one of only two licensed amateurs on the island of Malta in 1958/9). However, although I have not used Morse for several decades, I discovered recently that I can still read it at about 20 words per minute but I can no longer write it down at those speeds because, with advancing years, my pen hand no longer works that fast! However, I can type it straight into the word processor at 20 wpm, but that's another matter.
Next