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Actual words were easier for the telegraph operator to send and receive so they were charged less than a scramble of letters or nonsense. Words were charged ind
by Symbiote 3y ago
Actual words were easier for the telegraph operator to send and receive so they were charged less than a scramble of letters or nonsense. Words were charged individually, but could be up to 10 letters long. It makes sense to avoid the shortest words to get some error correction, "— ." = "T E" could be misheard as "—." = "N".
The international regulations limited the cheaper rate messages to only certain languages, of which one was Latin, so the codebooks used that to avoid confusion with modern languages.
(See my other comment and read the introduction in the linked book.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- INTPenis 3y agoOh so words were charged indiviually. That's strange but ok. So that means if you could hypothetically serialize/compress the whole data set into one word you'd be most cost effective.
- ale42 3y agoBut as said before, it looks like words were limited to 10 letters. So you could encode/compress a bit, but not a long message into a single 243-letters word...
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> But as said before, it looks like words were limited to 10 letters. On average or individually? A cap of 10 letters doesn't really make sense if you're specifically allowing Latin to be charged by the word.
- lmm 3y agoYou get charged some multiple of sum([ceil(length(word) / 10) for word in words]), plus a flat base fee. At least that's how it was the last time I sent a telegram.