BBC World Service 09:30-10:00h & 20:00-20:30h.
A look inside the World Morse Code championships.
The World Morse Code championships are fiendishly competitive. Contestants from many countries travel to Tunisia, where they face each other across tiny tapping machines in a competition hall silent but for the clicking. It’s called High Speed Telegraphy – the skill and art of sending and receiving fast and accurately.
The best practice three or four hours a day. Belarusians win almost every time, with stiff competition from Russian and Romania. But maybe this year it will be the Japanese or Kuwaiti competitors.
Morse was invented in the 1830s by an artist, Samuel Morse, as the first global instant communication system. Its words are composed of just dots, dashes and spaces, transmitted over distance in coded signals of electrical pulses of sound or light. Many regional variations have been created over the years – in Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian and other alphabets.
What makes Morse coders tick – or tap? We meet the 13 year old, Ianis Scutaru, who’s broken the world record…and Ashraf Chaabane, the competition organiser and sole Tunisian contender. When refugees arrived in his country from Libya, during the Libyan civil war of 2011, it was radio amateurs who set up vital lines of communication.
Two hundred years after the first Morse messages flickered into life, 20 year old Indian student, Ankit Kumar and his friends are working on a device – ‘Silent Speak’ – to enable non-verbal people to communicate through Morse into any of the 28 languages of India.