Western Union sent the last telegram in February this year and Morse code stopped being used at sea in 1999 and it will stop being a requirement in the US for an amateur radio licence. You would have thought this spelled the death of a technology that was developed over 170 years ago.
However, I still use Morse every time I go flying. Radio beacons, which we use for navigation, transmit two or three letter identification codes in Morse and the only way you can be sure you’ve tuned the right station is to ident it by listening to this transmission. For example Bovingdon VOR is just North of my home field at Denham and it’s code is BNN or -… / -. / -. and for me it is the sound of coming home.
All this is preface to the fact that I was given a pager yesterday as part of a project that I’m working on. A PAGER! It’s like someone saying ‘we’ll send you a telegram’. I honestly thought pagers left the stage in the eighties along with shoulder pads and yuppie braces. The more serious observation is that the Press Release is a similarly outmoded method of communication. I wrote an opinion piece for a magazine about this and I hope to post it here soon.
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