"The Moores code": Morse, the drums and the dots

SUMMARY"The Moores code": Morse, the drums and the dots (Nov 7, 2026; Tito: "Clicks are like more code / The moores code"). WORDPLAY, Lens (Tito): Morse / Moors. RECORD, the man: Samuel F. B. Morse ran for mayor of New York in 1836 on the "Native American" ticket, which meant native-born white Protestants against immigrants; he got under 1,500 votes. He was a "virulent anti-Catholic" (Bowery Boys) and wrote Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. This closes the open lead from earlier sessions: yes, he ran as a "Native American," a party that took the land's own name. RECORD, his 1863 pamphlet An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery: slavery is divinely ordained, abolition by force sacrilegious; "Slavery to them has been Salvation, and Freedom, ruin." The man credited with the code that wired the country defended holding people. CREDIT, Disputed: how much of the dot-dash code was worked out by his partner Alfred Vail is argued by historians (needs deep research; the "claimed by" question). THE OLDER CODE, Record: African talking drums. Kele (Congo) is a two-tone language; drums sent the tones across the forest; "Every village had an expert drummer and every villager could understand what the drums were saying." Drummers solved the ambiguity with redundancy, about eight drum words per spoken word, found by trial and error without formal theory (Carrington 1949; Gleick, The Information, via NYRB 2011). Europeans called it the "bush telegraph." Morse's telegraph came in 1838, the code perfected by 1844

PATTERNtwo-state signals carrying language (drum tones, dots and dashes, Ifá's marks, khipu spin; P811), with the land's and Africa's versions older than the one that got the patent and the credit

OPENdrum and signal codes in the Americas (the slit drum teponaztli; smoke, mirror and fire signals on record), and how the held people's drums were banned (the 1740 South Carolina Negro Act banned drums, P-ledger law).