Eight characters, five symbols each. The round ones are dots and the
long ones are dashes, and a character ends wherever you stop ticking.
It arrives saying SOS.
What follows is a grid of checkboxes making up a Morse decoder. Each
character has five slots and each slot has a dot box and a dash box,
all labelled by character number, symbol number and which of the two it
is. Leave both clear to end a character. The decoded letter appears
above its column.
12345
Some of it happened here
The country's first telegraph line ran Christchurch to Lyttelton in
1862, so the town could find out what the port had just unloaded.
Cable Bay near Nelson is called that because the cable from Sydney
came ashore there in 1876. Before it, news from anywhere else arrived
by ship and was already weeks old. There are actually a few Cable Bays
around New Zealand. There is one on Waiheke Island, where I am from,
and it has a vineyard on it now.
Rutherford was building detectors for radio waves at Canterbury
College in the 1890s, at about the same time Marconi was working out
how to send Morse over them.
E is one dot and T is one dash because they are the letters English
uses most. The frequencies were counted out of a printer's type case.