Telegraph code and sentence gaps should be 5 or 7 dots long (change from earlier standard – 5 dots). The speed of sending is also referred to as words per minute, and is classically based on the 'paris' formula - as 'paris' is considered to be an average length word. See main article on Morse Code. Morse code can even be 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. In
American Morse code a type of distortion called dispersion that gets progressively worse with the length of the cable. Dispersion severely limits the rate that Morse can be sent because of intersymbol interference. For instance, the first transatlantic telegraph cable of 1858 could only sustain a transmission rate of less than 1 word per minute. This interference is worse with American Morse because it has a greater proportion of closely spaced dots than the Gerke code. The Gerke code was adopted as a standard for transmission over cables by the Austro-German Telegraph Union (which included many central European states) at a conference in