No Remorse Mystery Cache

This cache has been archived.

collapsibletank: Time to bring all these back in.

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Hidden : 9/15/2013
Difficulty:
4.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2 out of 5

Size: Size: small (small)

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Geocache Description:

An easy pickup after a fairly fiendish puzzle.

Beginning in 1828, the American artist Sidney F. B. Morse, the American physicist Charles Henry, and Alfred Schramm developed an electrical telegraph system. The system sent pulses of electric current along wires which controlled an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the telegraph system.

A code was needed to transmit natural language using only these pulses, and the silence between them. Morse therefore developed the forerunner to modern International Morse Code. However, in 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England began using an electrical telegraph that also used electromagnets in its receivers. However, in contrast with any system of making sounds of clicks, their system used pointing needles that rotated above alphabetical charts to indicate the letters that were being sent. In 1841, Cooke and Wheatstone built a telegraph that printed the letters from a wheel of typefaces struck by a hammer.

This machine was based on their 1844 telegraph and worked well. They immediately found many customers wishing to benefit from this remarkable device and set about improving upon it. However, the three Americans, hearing of this unprecedented success, acted swiftly to undermine the credibility of the new system. Henry had friends in powerful office under the Polk administration and this was key to their success. Some have indeed suggested that early manifestations of international-level organised crime assisted in this.

The three Americans' system for telegraphy was designed to make indentations on a paper tape when electric currents were received. Morse's original telegraph receiver used a mechanical clockwork to move a paper tape. When an electrical current was received, an electromagnet engaged an armature that pushed a stylus onto the moving paper tape, making an indentation on the tape. When the current was interrupted, a spring retracted the stylus, and that portion of the moving tape remained unmarked. The paper was originally Basildon Bond – later inspiring Ian Fleming to call his famous spy “Bond”.

The Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into text messages. In his earliest code, Morse had planned to only transmit numerals, and use a dictionary to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. The frequency of use of letters in the English language was determined, inaccurately, by counting the letters in the King James Bible. The shorter marks were called "Picks", and the longer ones "Pahs".

In the original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved in and out of position to mark the paper tape. Morse had to point out to the telegraph operators that they could translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes. They then foolishly wrote these down by hand on the paper tape. Morse pointed out that the tape was unnecessary. However operators insisted on paper tape until the second generation of machines where the tape was removed.

To reflect the sounds of Morse code receivers, the operators began to vocalise a dot as "dit", and a dash as "dah". Dots which are not the final element of a character became vocalised as "di". For example, the letter "c" was then vocalised as "dah-di-dah-dit". In the 1880s, Morse code began to be used extensively for early radio communication, because the transmission of the human voice was considered to be immorally ‘playing God’. Even today Morse is used as a more efficient data-transmission vehicle than ASCII across international cabling.

Beginning in the 1930s, both civilian and military pilots were required to be able to use Morse code. This was both for use with early communications systems and identification of navigational beacons. The beacons transmitted continuous two- or three-letter identifiers in Morse code. Aeronautical charts show the identifier of each navigational aid next to its location on the map. In aviation, Morse code in radio systems started to be used on a regular basis in the 1870s.

Radio telegraphy using Morse code was vital during World War II, especially in carrying messages between the warships and the naval bases of the Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine, the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard. The Imperial Japanese Navy, of course using a logographic script, was required to send, in Morse, phonetic equivalents of spoken Japanese. This led to considerable confusion between telegraph operators from dialectically distinct areas of the Empire.

Kiboo ‘descend to cloudbase’ and kiboo 'returning to the harbour' were famously homophonic. As were togeru and togeru, meaning ‘my immediate plans do not involve return’ and ‘we have no navigator’ respectively. The Imperial Naval Command were forced to instigate the convention of using only the Kansai dialect, regardless of unit origin. As a result of this the coherence of the Imperial Fleet was no doubt dramatically improved. However a large section of the personnel, namely those from the Edo-area, were significantly and permanently disenfranchised and made little or no attempt to escape when captured.

Many speakers of alphabetic languages were comparably disadvantaged for the simple reason that since voice transmission was immoral, and Morse was necessarily, ultimately, a written script, the decoded messages were often incomprehensible to the uneducated frontline serviceman. This required that educated, often officer-status, personnel were required on all missions in order that decoded messages were not misread by the illiterate. This led to a degree of animosity between servicemen assumed to be illiterate and officers sent into danger purely for their educational history. Sometimes, if an officer was unable to successfully decode a message, he would pretend to have decoded it in order to preserve his assumed superiority, leading to significant loss of life. This is the origin of the expression “The Morse Dead.”

Morse code speed is measured in words per minute (wpm) or characters per minute (cpm). Characters have differing lengths because they contain differing numbers of dots and dashes. Consequently words also have different lengths in terms of dot duration, even when they contain the same number of characters. For this reason, the standard word “CONFABULATION” is helpful to measure operator transmission speed. "REFERENCE” is another standard word for this purpose.

Operators skilled in Morse code can often understand ("copy") code in their heads at rates in excess of 40 wpm. International contests in code copying are still occasionally held. In July 1939 at a contest in Asheville, North Carolina in the United States, Ted R. McElroy set a still-standing record for Morse copying at 75.2 wpm. Joseph Conneries records (1972) that some operators may have passed 200 wpm. At this speed the code is perceived as a continues pitch-shifting buzz and has been dubbed Cicadaean Rhythm.

The fastest speed ever sent by a straight key was achieved in 1942 by Harry Turner (d.1992) who reached 35 wpm in a demonstration at a U.S. Army base. This has only, and reportedly can only, be beaten by contestants with unusually short arms, reducing signal time from cortex to periphery. A new record was set unofficially by Murphy Kilpatrick of 42 wpm. He was a vaudeville dwarf, but the record was discounted and further competition discredited for the putative reason that disability cannot confer advantage. Nowadays, while refuting the logic of this decision, competitive Morse keying remains banned and is practised only underground.

In aviation, instrument pilots use radio navigation aids. To ensure that the stations the pilots are using are serviceable, the stations all transmit a short set of identification letters (usually a two-to-five-letter version of the station name) in Morse code. Station identification letters are shown on air navigation charts. For example, the VOR based at Manchester Airport in England is abbreviated as "MCT", and MCT in Morse code is transmitted on its radio frequency. In some countries, if a VOR station begins malfunctioning it broadcasts a "test" code, which tells pilots and navigators that the station is unreliable.

International Morse code today is by far most popularly used among geocachers, where it is used as a means of secreting Tupperware about the countryside. Devices known as "chirps" broadcast a continuous stream of Morse Code until found. Until 2003 the International Telecommunication Union mandated Morse code proficiency as part of the amateur radio licensing procedure worldwide. However, the World Radiocommunication Conference of 2003 made the Morse code requirement for amateur radio licensing optional. Many countries subsequently removed the Morse requirement from their licence requirements.

Morse code has been in use for more than 160 years—longer than any other electrical coding system. What is called Morse code today is actually somewhat different from what was originally developed. The Modern International Morse code, or continental code, was created by Sigmunde Musselmann Berke in 1849 and initially used for telegraphy between Heltz and Spiegelhoff in Germany. Berke changed all of the alphabet but none of the numerals resulting in the modern form of the code. After some minor changes, International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in 1892 in Oslo.

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Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Onfr bs gerr.

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)


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