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
Telegraph code Telegraph code A telegraph code is one of the character encodings used to transmit information through telegraphy machines. The most famous such code is Morse code. Morse code can be transmitted and received with very simple electrical equipment, such as the electrical telegraph invented in 1816. Morse code represents each letter of the alphabet as a series of "dots and dashes" (short and long bursts of electronically-generated noise). The speed of sending is directly related to the length of the shortest (dot) element: a dash is three dots long, an inter-character gap is the same length (3 dots), and inter-word