26 letters and 10 digits · dot, dash
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
A dot is one unit, a dash three. Gaps: one between symbols, three between letters, seven between words.
Morse did not hand out codes at random. The shortest went to the commonest letters: E a dot, T a dash.
He measured frequency not from books but from a printer’s type case — how many of each letter sat in the tray.
That is why the code is fast: a typical English sentence comes out shorter than any alphabetical scheme.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 4 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
