Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail also developed a telegraph machine, which is what’s used to ship Morse Code messages. A telegraph operator sits at the machine and taps out long and short faucets to characterize the letters of the message he’s sending. I imagine it should take plenty of focus and a very good memory to maintain track of all those dots and dashes!

I considered this for a couple of weeks and did some analysis on the InterWeb. I don’t normally worry about protecting my cellphone charged as I take a charging lead and cigar lighter plug with me, but was very interested in the leap start capability. I came throughout a YouTube video of someone testing one. First it was used to start out a motorbike, a number of times, then on to begin a car, or mild truck, several occasions.

There isn’t a standard representation for the exclamation mark (! ), although the KW digraph (— — — —) was proposed in the eighties by the Heathkit Firm (a vendor of assembly kits for beginner radio equipment). Whereas Morse code translation software prefers this model, on-air use is just not yet universal as some newbie radio operators … Read the rest