Popular Science Monthly 



951 



cannot convince the right trio that "W.G." 

 was the greatest cricketer the world has 

 ever known. We, having no doubts about 



Fig. 5. Three more letters of the alphabet 

 spelled out by the men; these are F, L, Y 



the fact, take the chance of identifying the 

 late champion with the Morse initials, 

 though he would not have thought we 

 knew much about cricket if we had only 

 allowed him four stumps and two balls 



( . . ) for a country match. 



The pantomine is here rudely interrupted 

 by the sound of a buzzing airship propeller, 

 and, looking up, we descry a beautiful 

 monoplane gracefully winging its way, 

 heading straight for the summit of our 

 pyramid, behind which it presently dis- 

 appears. We remember this is the French 

 aviator, De Vol Plane, attempting to win 

 the £5,000 prize by making a circuit of the 

 world, upside down, without descending 

 once for gasoline, but in the midst of our 

 speculations as to his chances of success we 

 are recalled to the business in hand by a 

 sudden shuffle on the part of our acrobatic 

 friends. They have forgotten their cricket 

 controversy and hastily thrown themselves 

 into a curious group, as in Fig. 5, which 

 seems to us just a horrid jumble of people, 

 until Mr. Know-all, our Dragoman, ex- 



Fig. 6. The alphabet is completed by a quad- 

 ruple group of men representing C, J, Q, Z 



plains that the group represents the three 

 letters FLY, which is appropriate enough 

 under the circumstances, as we feel bound 



to admit. So we add those letters to our list. 



Our dusky entertainers now complete the 

 alphabet with a quadruple group, for which, 

 to our chagrin, we are able to find no 

 mnemonic peg whatever (Fig. 6), but which 

 we are told represents the four letters 

 C J Q Z , and I defy any man to make 

 anything approaching an intelligible word 

 out of that. 



I conclude this article by drawing atten- 

 tion to a very curious fact in connection 

 with the Morse Code — viz., that in dis- 

 tributing his symbols over the alphabet, 

 Mr. Morse did not, in many cases, allocate 



Table or chart showing the distribution of 

 Morse signals and their ideal allocation 



the shortest symbols to the most frequently 

 used letters, the amount of divergence from 

 the ideal distribution being shown in the 

 diagram above. 



Counting the dot as 1 and the dash as 3, 

 we get a specific time-value for each Morse 

 signal, and it will be seen that column four 

 of the diagram represents the correct 

 progressive order of the ideal Morse 

 alphabet, beginning with a single dot 

 valued at 1 and ending with a symbol 

 composed of a dot and three dashes valued 

 at 7. Thus the letter E, which is by far the 



