A telegraph code is a character encoding used to transmit information through telegraphy machines. The most famous such code is Morse code. A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the transmission of text through telecommunication networks. ... Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. ... Optical Telegraf of Claude Chappe on the Litermont near Nalbach, Germany Telegraph and telegram redirect here. ... 1922 Chart of the Morse Code Letters and Numerals Morse code is a method for transmitting information, using standardized sequences of short and long marks or pulses — commonly known as dots and dashes — for the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a message. ...

Manual telegraph codes

Morse code can be transmitted and received with very primitive equipment. It encodes each letter of the alphabet as a series of dots and dashes.

Morse code has even been used to transmit Chinese characters. There already existed dictionaries which numbered the Chinese characters. It is simply a case of sending the numbers by Morse Code, and these numbers are then looked up in the dictionary at the receiving end. 漢字 Chinese character in hànzì, hanja, kanji. ...

In practice, this was a slow process, unless done by an expert Chinese telegrapher who could remember the numbers of the all the 5,000 odd characters which are in common use.

Automatic telegraph codes

Manufacturers developed teleprinters to allow typed messages to be transmitted and received without Morse code training. At the time, hardware costs depended on the length of the longest code. With an alphabet of 26 uppercase letters, the code had to be at least 5 bits long. To reduce hardware cost, teleprinter manufacturers adopted the fixed-length 5 bit Baudot code (rather than trying to use variable-length Morse code). Teletype machines in World War II A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is a now largely obsolete electro-mechanical typewriter which can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point through a simple electrical communications channel, often just a pair of wires. ... The Baudot code, named after its inventor Émile Baudot, is a character set predating EBCDIC and ASCII and used originally and primarily on teleprinters. ...

Users were not satisfied with the limited character set available in Baudot code. Demand for lowercase letters and more punctuation marks led to teleprinters with 7 bit ASCII code. A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ... For other uses, see ASCII (disambiguation). ...

(Demand for accented vowels led to the 8 bit ISO 8859-1. Demand for Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and other letters led to many variations of ISO 8859. Demand for using more than one of these sets of letters at the same time led to the 16 bit Unicode. Demand for Chinese characters led to 20 bit Unicode, which clearly is impossible for any typewriter like formed character mechanical teleprinter, although dot-matrix printers can print Chinese characters.) ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... ISO 8859, more formally ISO/IEC 8859, is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit character encodings for use by computers. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this Underwood Five, were long time standards of government agencies, newsrooms, and sales offices. ...