October 9, 2007
A Dying Language II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post on Morse code is startling and a bit distressing. It had not occurred to me that Morse could be dying until he mentioned the fact, which now seems blindingly obvious. Where (and why) would it have survived? I am, I suppose, just old enough be someone who for couple of weeks thought about getting a ham radio operator’s license. I very, very briefly learned Morse, although not well enough to remember much of it now, and considered getting a merit badge for this feat, before a very early departure from the Boy Scouts. I do remember my father bringing home what was called a short-wave radio, a thing not much smaller than a breadbox, painted what in the late 1950s seemed a very snappy white-streaked beige. It is still by the bed in the room I lived in as a child—I noticed it a couple of years ago—and it had, of course, tubes in it. Perhaps a decade ago, when visiting my mother, I turned it on, and I waited for a very long time while they warmed up. I do remember listening to the pips of Morse when it first arrived. I did not know Morse well enough to decode the messages and marveled that they might have come from anywhere in the world. If the information visible through the great glass plate on the front of the machine was any guide, and in retrospect I am not sure it was, some of them came from remarkably far away. They were to me what I dimly remember H. L. Mencken observing freight cars had once been to small boys growing up inland, and oceangoing ships to small boys who had seen a port—infinitely romantic evocations of both the breadth of the world and the fabulous yet suddenly conceivable prospect of getting into contact with a larger patch of it than one had yet seen. One might not have to learn the French the terrifying Mr. Nolan barked at us in grammar school; I somehow got the notion Morse would do. In books then written for boys, Morse got you out of bad jams—locked in a room by kidnappers, or in a German POW camp’s cooler, you softly rapped SOS (or some other message) against a wall, and good things happened, a reward for being prudent and resourceful enough to have learned Morse code. And as it happened, I knew that Morse really could get you out of places and into the much wider world. It had gotten my grandfather out of a tiny town in West Virginia, when he’d walked down a mountain and gotten a job as a telegrapher at the age of 13. From there he’d become a conductor on the B&O, and then a merchant seaman who had rounded the Horn—all because he’d known Morse code. I remember telling that story to the former editor of American Heritage Magazine, and I remember him whistling respectfully. “A lightning slinger!” he’d exclaimed, a phrase that did not make Morse code any less romantic in my twenties than it had been when I was half that age. Now it turns out that Morse is dying. The world suddenly (and I am sure irrationally) seems much smaller, and a deal less intoxicating.
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