American Morse Lives

While the International Morse Code was adopted in the late 1800s, and has become the standard for amateur radio communications, American Morse continued to be used here in the U.S. well into the 20th century. And it still has a following today.

The Morse Telegraph Club is an international organization dedicated to the perpetuation of the knowledge and traditions of telegraphy and American Morse Code. Their website is full of interesting stuff about American Morse telegraphy.

One thing that caught my eye was a link to a program called The Mill. The Mill in an American Morse simulator that also has features for teaching telegraphy and improving the skills of telegraphers at all levels of proficiency. The Mill is a DOS program and runs just fine on my Windows 98 laptop. It’s a free download.

A couple of months ago, I downloaded and started playing around with the program. It does accurately reproduce the clicking of a telegraph sounder, and I quickly found out that my International Morse skills did not make me good at American Morse. It’s a completely different world, especially when you throw in the characters such as L, which is a very long dah.

Even so, I find it intriguing, and I hope to get back to it someday.

UPDATE: 11/29/06
Thanks to John, N5DWI, I’ve just learned about a couple of other programs that will teach you American Morse:

• Instructograph
• Morse KOB

Both of these programs run on Windows PCs. Instructograph also requires that your PC be running Windows XP or Vista.

There are two versions of KOB Morse. KOB 2.1.0—the latest version—requires Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0, which requires 280 MB of free space on your hard drive for the installation process.