American Morse code

The message is a Bible verse from Numbers 23:23, chosen for Morse by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Governor of Connecticut.

[1] This interference is worse with American Morse because it has a greater proportion of closely spaced dots than the Gerke code.

[2] The Gerke code was adopted as a standard for transmission over cables by the Austro-German Telegraph Union (which included many central European states) at a conference in 1851.

It was necessary to have a common code as the Union had also agreed to direct connection of cables across borders (as opposed to recoding and retransmission by an operator).

Overhead wires, used for most land routes in the US, have nowhere near as big a problem with dispersion as undersea or underground cables, and the companies had no wish to retrain their staff.

However, International Morse predominated for ocean-going vessels, and many U.S. shipboard operators became skilled in transmitting both versions of the Code as needed.

American Morse has multiple lengths of dashes and spaces and inadvertently transmitting the wrong ones and other timing errors by novice operators is known as hog-Morse.