The telegraph key · keyed & counted
Type a message. It leaves the key as real Morse — the same rhythm an operator would send. Then see the trick hidden in the code itself.
The trick
A dit takes one beat, a dah takes three. Line the 26 letters up by how often they appear in English and the codes get longer as the letters get rarer — the whole alphabet is a compression scheme built by hand.
How they knew
To build the code, Alfred Vail — Samuel Morse's partner — needed to know which letters English leaned on most. The story goes that he walked into a newspaper's composing room and counted the pieces of movable type in the printers' cases: the more worn-down and numerous a letter's type, the more often it was set. E and T had the fullest bins, so they got a single dit and a single dah. Q, J, X and Z sat almost untouched — and drew the longest codes.