Farnsworth Morse

Farnsworth Morse teaches you to hear Morse code, and translates it while you learn. THE TRAINER Morse is not read, it is heard. A character sent at fifteen words a minute is a shape you recognise the way you recognise a spoken word; the same character sent slowly is a row of dots you count, and counting is the habit that stops people at ten words a minute and keeps them there. So the trainer uses the Koch method, which starts you at full character speed on the very first lesson with two letters, K and M. When you copy those at ninety percent, it adds a third. Nothing gets faster as you improve, because it was already fast — what grows is the alphabet. The gap between characters is yours to set. That is Farnsworth timing: characters at, say, twenty words a minute with the silence stretched to give ten overall, so you have time to think without ever learning to count. The spacing follows…