Derek Cohn, 49, of Clayton, Mo., left, an amateur telegraph operator and a member of the Morse Telegraph Club, receives a morse code message during the Oct. 1 meeting of the club in Ferguson, Mo.

On July 12, 1999, the nation’s final message in Morse code was sent out to sea from a remote Bay Area radio station. The end of an era, the room’s mood was mournful. Grizzled old men wept.

Morse Code is a system that uses dots, dashes and spaces to communicate letters and numbers. It was first created during the 1830s by Samuel F.B. Morse but was later improved in 1851 to create the ...