American Morse code standard for U.S. landline telegraph companies, including the dominant company, Western Union, in part because the original code, with fewer dashes, could be sent about 5% faster than International Morse. American Morse also was commonly used for domestic radio transmissions on the Great Lakes, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. However, International Morse predominated for ocean-going vessels, and many U.S. shipboard operators became skilled in transmitting both versions of the Code as needed. As already mentioned, American Morse is less suitable for use on cables because of the high density of dots. However, this same feature, together with the
Hog-Morse For instance, the international code has only two symbols, dots and dashes, but the American code has several lengths of dash. There is a distinction between "L" () and "T" (). Also, in the international code the space between symbols within a character is always the same, but American Morse has two different spaces. The letters "S" (), "C" (), and "R" () all consist of three dots, but the timing is different in each case. A frequently quoted, but possibly apocryphal, story from the historical period concerns the similarity of "L" and "T" in the American code. A company