Telegraph code

A telegraph code is a character encoding used to transmit information through telegraphy machines. The most famous such code is Morse code.

Manual telegraph codes

Morse code can be transmitted and received with very primitive equipment. It encodes each letter of the alphabet as a series of dots and dashes.

Morse code has even been used to transmit Chinese characters. There already existed dictionaries which numbered the Chinese characters. It is simply a case of sending the numbers by Morse Code, and these numbers are then looked up in the dictionary at the receiving end.

In practice, this was a slow process, unless done by an expert Chinese telegrapher who could remember the numbers of the all the 5,000 odd characters which are in common use.

Automatic telegraph codes

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