‘Why don’t you write, stupid?’

LIGHTER MOMENTS
Hilarion “Abe” Pawid

It all started with the “dot-dash-dot” code. This was 156 years ago somewhere in 1843 to 1844 when two men: Samuel F.B. Morse and his friend Alfred Vail sought out ways to deliver messages faster than human runners or on horseback.

The method is called Morse code named after its designer which up to this cyber age is still being practiced by military signal officers and boy scouts.

The first message sent via electrical wires from Washington D.C. to Baltimore read: “What hath God wrought”. Not long after in 1846, engineers who installed the wires along the railways in Pennsylvania sent the more popular message. It read: “Why don’t you write stupid?” That phrase later became the favorite of writers and journalists.

From then on further discoveries in relaying messages faster followed. Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell advanced the existence of radio waves. Germany’s Heihnrish Hertz proved that radio waves were real leading to wireless communications.

It was in l901 when an Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless radio message across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1905, Canadian physicist Reginald Fessenden invented a voice transmitter and made the first radio broadcast a year later.

Perhaps, the inspiration of Morse and Vail must have come with the Indian long distance communication system by smoke signal. But unknown to Morse and Vail, the American Indians, and the communication scientists their discoveries would open up the airwaves into cyberspace with fast transmission methods and gadgets.

Today cell phones, television, radio, and computers have brought the world closer by a flick of the buttons. A voice at the other side of the globe can be heard; and visuals of world interest across the oceans and wide land mast can be instantly viewed in television and computers.

Surely science is moving the world beyond the smoke signals of the American Indian or the dot-dash-dot code. The Philippines, despite its being a poverty stricken country, has move with the pace of cyber space communications. She has gained the notoriety for sending/receiving the most number in text messages on planet earth.

Young and old citizens are addicted to this dexterity enhancing gadget called cell phone. It has become a fad among the young who find chatting over trivial matters under the sun.

But guess, the young may not be “stupid” to find cell phone texting as “being connected” with their love ones or friends. Like smoking a cigarette, they get addicted to this craze and get in touch!