Poetic Licence: A Brief History Of Morse
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Your support makes all the difference.After 160 years of helping to save lives, Morse code was officially replaced worldwide this week by satellite and ground-based technology. The system, devised in 1840 by the American portrait painter Samuel Morse, will no longer be used for maritime distress signals.
Dots and dashes didit didit
Did it in the films
And way out in the woolly west
Awaiting freight from Santa Fe
A marshall in the midday sun
Stands apprehensive with a gun
As sagebrush miles along the track
The buzzards squatting on the poles
Hear signals whisper down the wires
Past cactus, cowskulls, gopher holes
Where tumbleweed goes rolling by
And three bad hombres wait to die...
Dots and dashes didit didit
Did it down the line
When Mister Morse tapped out his test
"What hath God wrought!"
The sentence stayed
Unanswered by the snoozing past
Until the future spoke at last
And wagons came. And men and mines
Then motor cars and longer lines
Spread out across the yawning land
'Til progress had the upper hand.
Dots and dashes didit didit
Did it later on.
In radio blips from storm-tossed ships
Whenever wind and wave kicked up
And hapless vessels in distress
Their flares gone up, gone down, gone out
Still sent a desperate SOS
The universal rescue shout.
The dots and dashes didit didit
Did it for so long
It's odd to think they won't be there
Their crotchet/quavers in the air
Dot dot dot dash - the letter V
The wartime sign for Victory
Was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
And Samuel Morse's rhapsody
The tune still buried where he hid it
Didit didit didit didit.
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