Dot dot dash dash, over

and out
Letter from America, Monday,
February 8, 1999 12:05 GMT
On March 2, 2004, at the age of 95, following
advice from his doctors, Alistair Cooke
announced his retirement from Letter From
America - after 58 years, the longest-running
speech radio show in the world. This program
shows him at his chatty best.
A small ocean liner is ploughing westward across
the Atlantic in the summer of 1910. It is on its way
to Quebec. Aboard the ship there are two
passengers who particularly interest the captain
since two days after his ship had sailed out of
Antwerp, he’d received a wireless message about
these two passengers.
They were a youngish Mr John Robinson - a neat,
diffident, courteous man - who was accompanied
at all times by his son, the devoted Master Robinson who, if anything, was even smaller and elegant in an
almost girlish way.
The wireless message transmitted from London by the commander of the line was, to put it mildly,
fascinating but bristling with perils if misunderstood or acted on rashly.
The captain, before he made a move, wanted to be quite sure that Mr and Master Robinson were who the
wireless message said they might be. So he spent much social time with them - they listened to concerts
together, they told stories, they reminisced about America. Mr Robinson was an American doctor it seemed
who’d lived long in England and his son, understandably, had a London accent.
Five, six, seven days went by. On a bright day when the ship was approaching Quebec there was a brisk
wind, the captain was standing at the head of a staircase looking down over the promenade deck. Along it,
going away from him, were Mr and Master Robinson linked arm in arm on a walkabout.
The wind behind him, the captain shouted: “Mr Robinson”. No answer, no response of any kind. The two
walked on.
The captain shouted the name again and a third time, when Mr Robinson turned and apologised he was, he
said, slightly deaf. The captain knew he had his man. Both the alleged Mr Robinson and his alleged son
were arrested at sea. The father for the mutilation and wilful murder of his wife, the pretended son - who
was a girl - was held under suspicion.
Sailing into the harbour from which the two would be extradited back to England, the captain had occasion
to beckon the doomed little doctor to be quite sure he called to him along the deck: “Dr Crippen”. The
doctor turned round at once.
This famous episode has passed into history as being the first and, perhaps forever afterwards, the most
dramatic use of wireless telegraphy in detecting a criminal. And we were reminded of the man who was
responsible for wireless telegraphy in the first place when the word went out this week that no more words
would go out - dot dot dash dash - in the Morse Code.
In the age of the microchip and the delivery world-wide of an encyclopaedia of information in the blink of
an eye, no more Morse Code.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/274959.stm
 Dot dot dash dash, over and out

Samuel Finley Breese Morse - a very interesting character - was a Yankee. Born in Massachusetts at the
very end of the 18th Century to a famous geographer.
From his boyhood Sam Morse had a single passion which was painting. He was described at Yale as a
fickle student and he spent all his spare and his study time painting miniature portraits. Reluctantly his
parents allowed him to make a career of this pursuit and paid for him to go to England and study historical
painting - there was a terrific vogue at the time for enormous, definitive canvasses of the Battle of Lepanto,
the Surrender at Yorktown and so on.
So young Sam went off to London to study under the acknowledged master, Washington Allston - famous
for such colossal canvasses as The Deluge and Dead Man Revived by Touching the Bones of the Prophet
Elijah.
Young Morse had little luck with his own historical canvasses when he got back home so went back to
miniature portraiture. He went in to politics. He ran, unsuccessfully, for Mayor of New York. But he was
first and always, ‘till the day he died, a painter. And by now is recognised after Allston as the second best
American romantic painter of the early 19th Century.
But how about his telegraph? Morse was the genuine heir to an admirable 18th century tradition. That of a
man thoroughly professional in one trade or profession but a creative amateur in many others.
These young Americans thought no knowledge was odd. Benjamin Franklin is, of course, the prototype or
archetype - statesman, scholar, printer, but also thinking up the first public library, pondering lightning and
inventing the lightning rod as also an ingenious downdraft heating stove and a volunteer fire brigade and
bifocal spectacles.
When Morse, 40 years old, was coming home by ship from his long stretch in Europe he had a shipboard
conversation with a man who seemed to know a lot about the new electromagnet. And at home, back to
painting and teaching, Morse thought about this and after four years of nightly labour he produced his first
working electric telegraph.
He went into the business with two other men and then in 1838 announced the invention of his Morse
Code. As with many another startling invention most people - the professionals especially - were sceptical.
Don’t forget it took the British Navy - the Admiralty - 60 years to agree with James Lind that, yes, citrus
fruit was the answer to scurvy.
Morse nagged away at Congress for seven years until they finally let him build a telegraph line from
Baltimore to Washington and a year later came the famous day when the now 57-year-old bearded,
magisterial figure of the famous American painter sat down and threw a switch and flashed out to an
astonished nation the message: “What hath God wrought?”
After that his days were spent in trying to stay afloat in a flood of legal claims from other alleged inventors.
On the side he passed on to the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, the art of daguerreotypes.
In his 60s, after 11 years of wrangling litigation, the Supreme Court established his patent right. He was
honoured by several European governments and he made a fair amount of money. Whereupon, setting an
example for Andrew Carnegie, he gave it all away.
The Morse Code is now to be replaced by a satellite Mayday system on all ships over 300 tons. In the
matter of the Morse Code, and that chilling use of it aboard the SS Montrose in July 1910, astonishment
now passes to me who, after a casual galloping poll of my own, was startled to discover that four friends,
all of whom are well into their 40s or beyond, had never heard of Dr Crippen.
So would anybody like to be filled in briefly about what certainly, till about 1950 I’d say, most English
speaking middle aged people would have said was the crime of the century.
Well, as I said, Dr Crippen was an American doctor - small, nice, impeccably courteous man - who went
over to live in London in 1900. He was in his 39th year.
Half the time he practised and for the rest was with a pharmaceutical company doing lab work. He made a
pretty decent living most of which he lavished on his well-loved wife - a pretty, plumpish woman with
aspirations first to be an opera star.

2
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The truth was she wasn’t nearly good enough for the tattiest music hall. So she settled for a fantasy life and
having her husband throw parties for bohemian types who’d made it, in a modest way, on the halls.
One day Dr Crippen had to go on business to America and while he was away Mrs Crippen discovered a
friend - a male friend - who gave her presents. And not to elaborate on an old, old story the Crippens came
to loathe each other but made a pact to keep up a pleasant front.
Dr Crippen joined a new company and there met a pretty fragile young secretary of a modern type - a typist
in fact. He fell in love with her and soon after he and his wife decided on separate bedrooms Dr Crippen
enjoyed the young typist - one Ethel le Neuve - by day.
Until the day the doctor bought a deadly poison nobody perhaps, including himself, could have imagined
this sweet, kindly, hospitable man as a murderer. Nevertheless he gave the poison to his wife, took her
body, cut it up with anatomical precision into slabs and slices and buried the remains under the cellar floor.
He gave out that his wife had gone on a trip to America and then after a while he said he’d heard that she’d
died of pneumonia, and there was much sympathy from his friends. Until he brought Ethel le Neuve to live
with him and one evening party she was seen by a friend to be flaunting the vanished Mrs Crippen’s
jewellery. The friend went to Scotland Yard.
The upshot: an early visit from a detective inspector. Dr Crippen at once broke down and confessed he’d
woven a tissue of lies. The truth was his wife had gone away, possibly with a lover, and had told him she’d
never see him again.
The inspector spent the day with Dr Crippen searching the house and he found this a fair enough
explanation. He left, presumably for good.
And then, weirdly, incomprehensibly, Dr Crippen went into panic. Suppose the police came back and
implicated Ethel who’d been acquitted of all involvement from the start? He decided to flee, bought two
passages on the Quebec ship, had Ethel cut her hair and dress like a boy, went off and hoped to get lost and
beyond discovery in Canada.
The sudden disappearance of Dr Crippen prompted the inspector to go back and search the house again.
And, the second day, to come on a loose brick and eventually the grizzly human remains and that sent
Crippen’s description over the wires onto the newspapers, the wireless to Amsterdam and the famous
message to the captain of the Montrose, two days out.
The inspector said later that Crippen’s fatal mistake was to flee. The day the inspector spent with Crippen
at his house convinced him that Mrs Crippen’s voluntary disappearance was nothing but the truth. If
Crippen had stayed put, said the inspector, the case would have been written off as closed.
Dr Crippen, aged 47, was executed in November 1910. The SS Montrose’s Morse Code could signal: Over
and out.