Blame the Irish. All bad people who want to undermine democracy in America. Strange Catholics, papal lackeys, foreign menaces who, in addition to their misconceptions, will probably also bring the potato blight rampant on their island to the United States of America.
The one who had such thoughts in the mid-19th century New York Observer disseminated, signed his articles with the pseudonym “Brutus”. But that wasn’t his real name. In real life, the sworn name was: Samuel FB Morse. Morse celebrates the 150th anniversary of his death on April 2nd, if one can speak of celebrations at all in this context.
Samuel FB Morse is credited with inventing short messages. So this hectically sent out “news”, possibly blown into the world completely without thinking. A failed painter from a Calvinist family who, on the one hand, spread world conspiracy myths such as that according to which the Habsburgs allegedly wanted to install an emperor in the USA. On the other hand, Morse developed the ambition to send short texts over long distances using copper wire and electric shocks as well as the Morse alphabet he had devised. Similar to what is called “Twitter” today, for example.
Morse sent his first message from Washington to Baltimore in May 1844 – and since he was a pious man it was of course a quotation from the Bible (“What God Has Worked”). These four words from the book of Numbers come from a dialogue between Balak and Balaam. Today’s people, who only get their information from short messages, may mistake Balak and Balaam for football players. In reality, however, Balak is a king and Balaam is a soothsayer. In the fourth book of Moses, the king asks the soothsayer to curse the people of Israel. But something goes wrong and in the end the people are not cursed but blessed.
“Arrive Friday 13th at 2pm Christine”
Blessed was Samuel FB Morse as well, as he had millionaire Cyrus W. Field as a friend. Field was so enthusiastic about the idea of short messages that he financed Morse’s 4,000 km of undersea cable, which the Queen of England could use to communicate with the US President, for example (it took 16 hours to decipher 103 words at the time). A few years later, private individuals could also send messages by telegram (“Arrive Friday the 13th at 2 p.m., Christine”). They no longer had to wait for multi-page, laboriously handwritten letters. So the world became faster and faster, the news became more numerous. Still in 2013, according to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum 97 percent of worldwide Internet communication takes place via deep-sea cables alone. The only difference is that you can now send multi-volume instructions on cutting deep-sea cables via deep-sea cables, for example.
Again and again amateur radio clubs (yes, they still exist) point out how sustainable their technology is even now. If all deep-sea cables were to be cut – one would already have an idea by whom – the Morse alphabet and the Morse code device, which is easy to make yourself, could offer a way out. So it’s not surprising that even people like Friedrich Merz (ham radio call sign DK7DQ) or Cliff Richard (W2JOF) and many others continue to profess this somewhat outdated form of communication.
But it is no longer just radio and Morse, telegraphed and faxed, but also texted, whatsapped and tweeted. Also from Schurblern, who rail against pretty much everything that (see above) God has not brought about in their view. It is precisely because of the scumbags, which undoubtedly included Samuel FB Morse, that they are sometimes cursed, these short, quick messages.