This is from the January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian Magazine so the original title was "Looking to Ditch Twitter..." (Musk's purchase of the bird was completed :
Reviving a 200-year-old system, enthusiasts are putting the digit back in digital communication
For almost 20 years, Steve Galchutt, a retired graphic designer, has trekked up Colorado mountains accompanied by his pack of goats to contact strangers around the world using a language that is almost two centuries old, and that many people have given up for dead. On his climbs, Galchutt and his herd have scared away a bear grazing on raspberries, escaped from fast-moving forest fires, camped in subfreezing temperatures and teetered across a rickety cable bridge over a swift-moving river where one of his goats, Peanut, fell into the drink and then swam ashore and shook himself dry like a dog. “I know it sounds crazy, risking my life and my goats’ lives, but it gets in your blood,” he tells me by phone from his home in the town of Monument, Colorado. Sending Morse code from a mountaintop—altitude offers ham radios greater range—“is like being a clandestine spy and having your own secret language.”
Worldwide, Galchutt is one of fewer than three million amateur radio operators, called “hams,” who have government-issued licenses allowing them to transmit radio signals on specifically allocated frequencies. While most hams have moved on to more advanced communications modes, like digital messages, a hard-core group is sticking with Morse code, a telecommunications language that dates back to the early 1800s—and that offers a distinct pleasure and even relief to modern devotees.
Strangely enough, while the number of ham operators is declining globally, it’s growing in the United States, as is Morse code, by all accounts. ARRL (formerly the American Radio Relay League), based in Newington, Connecticut, the largest membership association of amateur radio enthusiasts in the world, reports that a recent worldwide ham radio contest—wherein hams garner points based on how many conversations they complete over the airwaves within a tight time frame—showed Morse code participants up 10 percent in 2021 over the year before.
This jump is remarkable, given that in the early 1990s, the Federal Communications Commission, which licenses all U.S. hams, dropped its requirement that beginner operators be proficient in Morse code; it’s also no longer regularly employed by military and maritime users, who had relied on Morse code as their main communications method since the very beginning of radio. Equipment sellers have noticed this trend, too. “The majority of our sales are [equipment for] Morse code,” says Scott Robbins, owner of ham radio equipment maker Vibroplex, founded in 1905, which touts itself as the oldest continuously operating business in amateur radio. “In 2021, we had the best year we’ve ever had … and I can’t see how the interest in Morse code tails off.”....
....MUCH MORE
Previously on Mr. Morse and his code:
"How the Titanic Made the Modern Radio Industry" (and Jack Kennedy, President)
Which naturally led to the Radio Pool of 1929 and eventually to John F. Kennedy winning the White House.*
"Partners in Crime: The Telegraph Industry, Finance Capitalism, and Organized Gambling, 1870-1920"
A repost from 2013 and an allegory for today on the intersection of technology, Wall Street and the fine line between enthusiasm and fraud.
The writer is too kind to the bucketeers, they were thieves, pure and simple.
The buckets were straight up gambling houses with the action comprised of side bets on the actual stock movements, not unlike collateralized default swaps when purchased by someone who doesn't own the underlying debt.
See our Nov. 2011 post "Are Derivatives Contracts Nothing More than Unenforceable Gambling Debts?"
