Have you ever wanted to communicate with your friends without any words? Without even talking to each other? Are you interested in learning about the international communication sensation used by spies and countrymen alike?
Well, welcome to morse code: a method of communication that uses dots and dashes to form letters in conventional speech.
You’ve probably heard of morse code before. It was invented way back in the 1830s, by American Samuel Morse, who obviously named the code after himself. Morse used this code for electrical telegraphy – he would type telegraph messages meant to cross long distances, by tapping out the code for each letter using a series of dots and dashes.

When Morse first invented the morse code, it wasn’t standardized. But in 1851, a conference of European countries delivered the International Morse Code, which became the basis for all morse communications using the English alphabet.

You can see these basic rules on the left. They give basic codes for the letters and numbers used in English, as well as 5 rules that need to be followed in morse code.   Those same basic rules govern all morse code – even the versions we use today!

The short signals in morse code are represented by dots, but in the world of morse, they are referred to as dits. The short signals, represented by dashes, are called dahs. Using a combination of dits and dahs, you can adequately represent any word in the English language!
In this lesson, we are going to show you how to use morse code to send coded, secret messages to your friends, family, and anyone else who needs to hear. As seen above, you can write out messages in morse code using the physical dots and dashes. Or, you can use a machine to sound out one-beat dits and three-beat dahs in order to send your message using sound. We will teach you much more about the history and origin of morse code in the lesson. The kind of machine used to formulate the early code- which makes morse code sounds – originally looked like this:

So, what do you say? Do you want to become a part of this ~160-year-old tradition, and learn how to send and receive encoded messages using morse code?