Famous Morse Code Messages in History

1844 — "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT": the first message

On 24 May 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the US Capitol in Washington and tapped out the first message on America's first telegraph line, to his assistant Alfred Vail in Baltimore, some 40 miles away. The words were not Morse's own: they were a line from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), chosen for the occasion by Annie Ellsworth, the teenage daughter of the Patent Commissioner — "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT". For the first time in history, a message had travelled faster than the messenger. Within a generation, wires — and Morse's code — covered continents.

.-- .... .- - / .... .- - .... / --. --- -.. / .-- .-. --- ..- --. .... -  ▶ Hear it

1871 — Samuel Morse's farewell to the operators

Twenty-seven years later, in June 1871, telegraph operators across America linked their circuits into one vast network for an evening to honour the code's inventor, now 80 and frail, at a banquet in New York following the unveiling of his statue in Central Park. Morse sent a farewell message over the wires to the whole "telegraph fraternity" — greeting and thanks to operators throughout the world, closing with the words "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will to men" — and signed it with his own name, S. Morse. It was his last public act; he died the following April. Every operator on the network that night understood they were hearing the key go silent.

His signature: ... / -- --- .-. ... .  ▶ Hear it

1912 — Titanic: CQD, then SOS

When RMS Titanic struck an iceberg late on 14 April 1912, senior wireless operator Jack Phillips reached first for the distress call he knew best: CQD (-.-. --.- -..), the Marconi company's standard since 1904 — CQ, the general call, with D for distress. His junior, Harold Bride, half-jokingly suggested trying the new international call as well: "Send SOS; it's the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it." Through the night, Phillips sent both. The nearest ship, Californian, never heard them — her sole wireless operator had switched off and gone to bed minutes before the first call. Carpathia, 58 miles away, did, and raced through the ice to rescue 705 survivors. Phillips stayed at his key almost to the end and did not survive; Bride, washed overboard, lived to tell the story — including the joke that put SOS into history's most famous emergency. Read more on our SOS page.

-.-. --.- -..  ▶ Hear CQD   ... --- ...  ▶ Hear SOS

1966 — Jeremiah Denton blinks "TORTURE"

US Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton was shot down over North Vietnam in July 1965 and spent nearly eight years as a prisoner of war. In May 1966 his captors put him in front of television cameras for a staged propaganda interview, expecting him to say he was well treated. Denton spoke carefully for the camera — and while he spoke, he blinked, in Morse code, a single word: TORTURE (- --- .-. - ..- .-. .). A US naval intelligence officer reviewing the footage noticed the unnatural blinking, decoded it letter by letter, and Washington had its first proof that American prisoners were being tortured. Denton survived captivity, came home in 1973, and later served in the US Senate — but it was those blinks — sent with the only transmitter his captors could not take from him — that made him immortal.

- --- .-. - ..- .-. .  ▶ Hear it

2010 — the pop song that carried a message to hostages

The most ingenious Morse message of the modern era hid inside a love song. Colombian military intelligence knew that FARC guerrillas let their hostages listen to the radio — so, working with advertising creatives, they had a pop ballad written and produced with a secret woven into its music: at one point, beeps disguised within the song's arrangement spell out, in Morse, a message aimed at the captives: "19 liberated. You're next. Don't lose hope." The song was played on hundreds of radio stations across Colombia. Several hostages, after their release, confirmed they had heard it — a chart song as a lifeline, carrying proof in code that they had not been forgotten. Part of its closing line sounds like this:

-.. --- -. .----. - / .-.. --- ... . / .... --- .--. .  ▶ Hear "DON'T LOSE HOPE"

Want to decode a message of your own? Paste any dots and dashes into our Morse code decoder, or turn the sound up on the audio translator and explore these messages letter by letter.

Sources and further reading

Every story above is documented in the historical record. Where our telling compresses events, these sources carry the full detail:

• The 1844 first message and Morse's 1871 farewell — Samuel Morse (Wikipedia) and Morse code (Wikipedia).
• Titanic's CQD and SOS calls, and operators Phillips and Bride — RMS Titanic (Wikipedia).
• Jeremiah Denton blinking TORTURE in 1966 — Jeremiah Denton (Wikipedia).
• The 2010 Colombian hostage song — The Exploratorium: "The Great Colombian Morse Code Song".
• The code every message above follows — ITU Recommendation ITU-R M.1677.

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