Saw this on another reflector I subscribe to and had to laugh at it,
73 Jim
W5JO
Passed along by Chip, N5LTZ:
Morse Code Still Beats SMS
It seems that morse code is still faster at sending text messages than using txt speak. Even when the morse code sender is 93 years old and the SMS challengers were teenagers!
According to The Times , an Australian museum staged a contest that pitted the oldest type of electronic text messages with the newest.
Devised by Samuel Morse in 1832, the simple combination of dots and dashes was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997.
Not only was the technology a battle of ages, but so were the contestants. Tapping out the winning morse code message was 93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill, who learnt to use the technique in 1927 when he joined the Australian Post Office.
He easily defeated his 13-year-old rival, Brittany Devlin, who was armed with a mobile phone and a rich vocabulary of text message shorthand. Mr Hill, whose messages were transcribed by another telegraph veteran, Jack Gibson, 82, then repeated the feat against three other children and teenagers with mobile phones.
In the competition, at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Mr Hill and his rivals were asked to transmit a line selected at random from an advertisement in a teenage magazine.
It read: "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing."
While the telegraphist tapped out the line in full, to be deciphered by Mr Gibson, Miss Devlin employed text slang to save time. She keyed: "hey gf u can txt ur best pals 2 tel them wot u r doing, where ur going and wot u r wearing."
Just 90 seconds after Mr Hill began transmitting, Mr Gibson announced that he had the message received and written down correctly. It took another 18 seconds for Miss Devlin's message to reach the mobile phone belonging to her friend. Mr Hill said that he was impressed by modern technology, even though his clunky telegraph machine emerged on top in three further contests.
Want to brush up your Morse Code skills? This site claims to be able to teach you in just a minute!:
www.learnmorsecode.com
