学进去

It was October 1837. Samuel Morse and I, Alfred Vail, sat in our workshop. We were studying how to turn dots (●) and dashes (—) into a message.

Morse’s first idea was to tap out numbers-one tap for “1”, a long tap and two short ones for “12”, and so on. Then he made a big list of words and gave their numbers—“342”meant “train” and so on. But I wasn’t so sure this was the best way. His word book was huge. It would take hours to look up codes (代码). Too slow!

“Why couldn’t the dots and dashes stand for letters instead?” I shared my better idea.

“How could that work?” Morse asked.

“Well, for example, two dots could be ‘D’ instead of ‘2’. There are only 26 letters—why not give each one a dot-and-dash code? That way, words could be tapped out directly, letter by letter. Imagine the time saved!”

Morse snorted (哼了一声), really unhappy after all of his work on the word list. Just to try it, I wrote down the letters and gave each letter a tap code. Then I tapped out a message, and Morse deciphered (破译) it. Quickly!

He read out my message: “To tell the truth, I think this saves much time.” He nodded. “Yes, I see your point. Not bad.”

But I’d noticed something else about our code. “That message had a lot of T’s,” I said. “The code for a T is dash-dash dot…I’ll bet I could have done that even faster if T didn’t take so long to tap.”

Ten minutes later I was in the local newspaper office. With the help of a printer, I was soon back with a list of letters in order of how often they are used in English.

“Let it be so! It makes good sense to use the shortest codes for the most common letters. I see E is the favourite, so a single dot for E and a dash for T. To start, a dot-dash for A.” Morse said, patting me heartily on the back. “You impress me! Vail, you’re a genius (天才). ”

I smiled. I wouldn’t say so out loud, but I had to agree with him.