Tom Zytaruk, May 3, 2018 12:30 p.m.
Are you reading this story in print? Or perhaps on your smartphone, that indispensable device you ritualistically pin your eyes to every day and night?
One day, that oh-so-important gadget will surely become an anachronism as new modes of communication take over. One day, you might well find yourself explaining to your grandchildren or great-grandchildren what it was like to use an Android or iPhone as you view, from behind the display case glass in some dusty museum, a rare specimen that survived the march of time unbroken.
As the Good Book says, we’re all dust in the wind, and that applies to technology as well. Take, for example, Morse Code telegraphy, a system of text messaging consisting of dots and dashes, combinations of which represent letters or numerals. Considered to be one of humankind’s top 10 inventions, well before there were telephones, fax machines or computers, Morse Code beepity-beeped from a tapping device called a “straight key” along telegraph lines to bring people news of births and deaths, weddings, tragedy and joy, emergencies and disasters, and other news of personal and global import. This medium of communication was, in a word, indispensable.
But that was then.
The last surviving members of the B.C. Chapter of the Morse Telegraph Club held their final meeting on Thursday, April 26, in room A123 of the Oasis building at Fleetwood’s Elim Village retirement community, saying goodbye to this important era in the history of communications.
“We’re dying off. There’s very few of us left,” member Chris Naylor, 87, bluntly explained. When it comes to words, the elderly generally don’t kid around.
“It is the closing of an era,” he said. “Nobody knows Morse Code any more.”
It’s named after inventor Samuel F.B. Morse who, along with physicist Joseph Henry and engineer Alfred Vail, created the electrical telegraph system in 1836.
This means of communication played an immense role in critical moments in history — such as the RMS Carpathia receiving Titanic’s wireless distress call to save 705 souls, and train dispatcher Vince Coleman bravely sacrificing his own life to alert an incoming passenger train to the imminent Halifax explosion in 1917, saving nearly 300 lives.
Locally, the first telegraph message sent along a line linking the U.S. with New Westminster, by way of the Kennedy Trail, brought news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
The last train order sent by telegraph in North America was in the mid-1980s.
The surviving members of B.C.’s club marked the bittersweet occasion of putting their going concern to rest with a cake that was decorated with a small straight key and the words “What Hath God Wrought.”
It’s a phrase from Numbers 23:23 in the Bible and was the first message Morse dispatched, on May 24, 1844, witnessed by the U.S. Congress and sent from Washington D.C. to a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland.
The 21 people present at Surrey’s luncheon and final meeting — those 10 remaining members who could make it, some of them accompanied by their adult children — sat solemn as retired Lutheran pastor Alfred Johnson, 92, tapped out grace on a straight key, thanking God, by way of dots and dashes, and beepity-beeps, “for the privilege we had to be part of this wonderful system of communication which the Morse Code has been.”
Johnson worked as a telegrapher while attending seminary and raising two children. He started his career as a Morse telegrapher in 1944, as an assistant station agent with the Northern Alberta Railways in Hythe, Alberta at age 18.
After lunch, the club’s final business was done, finances were sorted out, and members decided to donate the remaining $78.28 in the kitty to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
