Morse Code Trivia
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98 free Morse Code trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Morse code trivia quiz covers the two-tone alphabet from Samuel Morse's 1844 telegraph line to its afterlife on the amateur bands. The easy questions are ones anyone could answer: what the dots and dashes are called, which letter is a single dit, what the famous distress call is, and the message that opened the Baltimore–Washington line. The harder end is for radio hams and history buffs: how long a dah lasts compared with a dit, how Alfred Vail worked out English letter frequencies, the German who rewrote half the alphabet, the 1865 Paris convention, why SOS was chosen and what it never stood for, the call the Titanic sent first, the standard word PARIS, Ted McElroy's 75.2 words per minute, the Vietnam POW who blinked TORTURE, why V sounds like Beethoven, the year the FCC dropped the code test, and the last words of the French Navy in Morse. Aviation beacons, prosigns and the Nokia SMS tone get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the code, its inventors and its famous uses before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Samuel Morse, inventions and Titanic quizzes next.
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Q 01Which inventor, a telegraph operator in his teens, nicknamed his first two children Dot and Dash?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison. Daughter Marion was Dot and Thomas Jr. was Dash, and the telegraph devices he went on to invent earned the money for his first laboratory.
Q 02Samuel Morse's telegraph marked dots and dashes on paper tape, but how did operators soon read messages instead?
By ear, from clicks
By ear, from clicks. The receiver clicked as it dented the tape, and operators found they could write a message straight down from the sound, so the tape was dropped and a simple sounder took its place.
Q 03In Morse code, what marks the end of one word and the start of the next?
A longer pause
A longer pause. Words are split by a silence seven dots long, letters by three and the marks inside a letter by one, so a sender who hurries the gaps runs words together.
Q 04Which letter of the alphabet is a single dit in Morse?
E
E. As the most common letter in English it was given the shortest code of all, so the average message takes fewer taps to send.
Q 05Which Los Angeles landmark has a rooftop beacon that blinks the word 'Hollywood' in Morse code?
The Capitol Records Tower
The Capitol Records Tower. Its spire has blinked the name since the round tower opened in 1956, though in 1992 it switched to tapping out 'Capitol 50' for the label's fiftieth birthday.
Q 06How were letter frequencies estimated when the Morse alphabet was being designed?
By counting a printer's stock of type
By counting a printer's stock of type. Printers keep most of the letters they use most, so the tallies showed which should get the shortest codes; whether Morse or his partner made the count is still argued over.
Q 07What had Samuel Morse originally planned to transmit instead of letters?
Numerals
Numerals. Each number stood for a word in a numbered dictionary, so every message had to be looked up at both ends, a step that vanished once each letter got its own code.
Q 08In which 2019 Oscar-winning film does a man hiding in a secret bunker send Morse code with the house lights?
Parasite
Parasite. The father flickers a light from the hidden cellar, copying a trick its previous occupant used, until his son spots the message from a hillside.
Q 09Which Clash song fades out on a guitar picking out SOS in Morse code?
London Calling
London Calling. Mick Jones made the beeps on a guitar pickup, a literal distress call to end a song that warns of one disaster after another.
Q 10Which Mars rover's wheels press the letters JPL into the Martian soil in Morse code?
Curiosity
Curiosity. Its builders were told the wheels could not carry the laboratory's initials as plain letters, so they hid them in the dots and dashes its cameras use to gauge how far it has rolled.
Q 11Which ship picked up Titanic's Morse distress call and steamed through the night to rescue her survivors?
Carpathia
Carpathia. Its operator caught the call around midnight, and the Cunard liner raced through the ice field to pull about 700 survivors from the lifeboats.
Q 12Which French pioneer did Samuel Morse meet in 1839 before bringing his picture-making process to America?
Louis Daguerre
Louis Daguerre. Morse published the first American account of the daguerreotype, opened a portrait studio in New York and taught the process to Mathew Brady, later famous as a Civil War photographer.
Q 13What message officially opened the Baltimore–Washington telegraph line on 24 May 1844?
What hath God wrought
Q 21Before switching to SOS, Titanic's wireless operator Jack Phillips first sent which older distress call?
CQD
CQD. It was the second operator, Harold Bride, who suggested trying the new international signal as well, and from then on the two calls were sent in turn.
Q 22How does the SOS signal differ from the letters S, O and S?
It is sent without gaps
It is sent without gaps. The original rules laid down one continuous string of dots and dashes and named no letters at all, so calling it SOS was only a handy way to remember it.
Q 23Which letter of the alphabet is sent in Morse code as one single dash?
T
T. As the second most common letter in English it was given one of the two shortest codes of all; M, by contrast, takes two dashes.
What hath God wrought. The operator at the Baltimore end tapped the same words straight back to show they had arrived, and the paper tape of the message survives in the Library of Congress.
Q 14Which future university founder built Morse's first telegraph line after Congress voted $30,000 for it in 1843?
Ezra Cornell
Ezra Cornell. He designed a plough to bury the wire in lead pipe, and when the buried line failed he strung it overhead on poles instead, the method telegraph lines kept.
Q 15What news reached Washington by telegraph on 1 May 1844, over an hour ahead of the train carrying it?
Henry Clay's Whig nomination
Henry Clay's Whig nomination. The wire then reached only to Annapolis Junction, 22 miles out, so the news from the Baltimore convention was taken off a train there and flashed ahead to the Capitol.
Q 16Samuel Morse was in Washington painting which hero of the American Revolution when his wife died suddenly in 1825?
Marquis de Lafayette
Marquis de Lafayette. Morse was then a portrait painter, and by the time the news reached him and he got home to New Haven his wife had already been buried.
Q 17Which country first adopted SOS as a distress signal, on 1 April 1905?
Germany
Germany. Its 1905 radio rules ordered operators to use the pattern, and a conference in Berlin the next year picked it for the whole world.
Q 18SOS never stood for 'Save Our Souls', so why was that pattern chosen?
It is hard to mistake
It is hard to mistake. Operators nicknamed the pattern SOS after the letters its dots and dashes happen to spell, and the 'Save Our Ship' readings were invented later still.
Q 19Which famous mail service shut down in October 1861, days after the first telegraph line linked America's two coasts?
The Pony Express
The Pony Express. Its riders had cut coast-to-coast news to about ten days, but the wire carried it almost instantly, and the service closed after only 18 months.
Q 20Before SOS, which company gave its ships' wireless operators a three-letter distress call of its own?
Marconi International Marine
Marconi International Marine. The firm leased out both the wireless sets and the men who worked them, so one company order set the rule aboard liners of many different shipping lines.
Q 24Which company, once America's telegraph giant, delivered its last telegram in 2006?
Western Union
Western Union. After about 150 years, phone calls and email had made the telegram useless, and the firm that once ruled American telegraphy carried on as a money-transfer business.
Q 25Which word did American POW Jeremiah Denton blink in Morse code during a 1966 North Vietnamese TV interview?
TORTURE
TORTURE. He blinked it letter by letter while answering the interviewer, giving US Naval Intelligence its first clear confirmation of how American prisoners were being treated.
Q 26Which letter's Morse rhythm matches the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?
V
V. The BBC made the four notes its call-sign for broadcasts to occupied Europe, and Churchill took up V for Victory as a rallying sign.
Q 27As voice radio took over from Morse in the 1920s, which spoken word was chosen as the international distress call?
Mayday
Mayday. It was picked in 1923 because it sounds like the French for 'help me', and because the S in SOS was hard to make out over a crackling voice channel.
Q 28What replaced Morse code as the worldwide system for ships' distress calls in 1999?
Satellite and automatic alerts
Satellite and automatic alerts. The Global Maritime Distress and Safety System sends a ship's alert to rescue centres ashore, so help no longer depends on a trained operator aboard another vessel hearing the call.
Q 29What happened to the first Atlantic telegraph cable weeks after it carried Queen Victoria's 1858 greeting?
Its signal died away
Its signal died away. The current was feeble from the first day and by early September nothing got through, so a lasting link had to wait until 1866, when the steamship Great Eastern laid a new cable.
Q 30Samuel Morse ran, and lost, on an anti-immigrant ticket for which office?
Mayor of New York City
Mayor of New York City. The inventor was also a leading anti-immigrant campaigner who wrote tracts warning of a Catholic plot against America, yet his 1836 run drew only 1,496 votes.