r (but not too far) away, who then interpreted this smoke to have some meaning. It is said that a fellow named Polybius (a Greek historian) came up with a system of alphabetical smoke signals in the 100s B.C., but there are no known re- corded codes. Wild Horses Until the 1850s in the U.S., the fastest way to send a message from one's home to someone else's home was by Pony Express. Here, you wrote what you wanted to say (the transmitter), gave the writing to a Pony Express man, who then hopped on his horse and rode to the destination (the channel), where the message would be read by the intended person (the receiver). Telegraph In 1844, a fellow named Samuel Morse built a device he called the tele- graph, the beginning of the end of the Pony Express. The transmitter consisted of a person and a sending key, which when pressed by the person, created a flow of elec- tricity. This key had three states: "Off" which meant the key was not pressed; "Dot," which meant the key was pressed for a short time and then released; and "Dash," which meant the key was pressed for a longer time and then released. Each letter of the alphabet was represented by a particular sequence of dots and dashes. To keep the time to send a message short, the most commonly used letters in the alphabet were represented by the fewest possible dots or dashes; for example, the commonly used "t" was represented by a single dash, and the much-loved "e" was represented by a single dot. This system of representing letters is the well-known Morse code. The channel was an iron wire. The electricity created by the person and the sending key (the transmitter) was sent along this wire to the receiver, which consisted of an audio- speaker and a person. When the electricity entered the audio-speaker from the iron wire, it made a beeping sound. A "Dot" sounded like a short beep, and a "Dash" sounded like a longer beep. The person, upon hearing these beeps, would then decode the letters that had been sent. The overall system could send about two letters a second