Re: SOS became the international maritime distress signal (3/10/1906)

 Ar an triú lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark:

 > ...---...
 > At the First International Radiotelegraph Convention, in Berlin. The Germans
 > had already begun using this signal.

“In both the 1 April 1905 German law and the 1906 international regulations,
the distress signal is specified as a continuous Morse code sequence of three
dots / three dashes / three dots, with no mention of any alphabetic
equivalents.”

So the specification of the dots and dashes came first, and given there were
two common alphanumeric encodings for Morse code at the time, the alphanumeric
meaning was not then specified.

 > "neither so short as to be ambiguous nor so long as to be unwieldy"
 > (Crystal worded this with "too", which seems wrong.)
 >
 > It's technically a _prosign_ (procedural sign) -- a single unit, not a letter
 > sequence.
 >
 > it's an _ambigram_ -- reads the same when flipped over (useful if you've
 > written it on the ground and people are searching for you from different
 > directions...)

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)