SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) It's finally taps for U.S. ship-to-shore
telegraph, drowned out by the high-speed chattering of satellite
communications, high frequency radios and e-mail.

Globe Wireless, an 89-year-old California communications company,
Monday sent out what it billed as the last commercial maritime
Morse Code message from North America, a terse sign-off that repeated
The first words transmitted by the telegraph's inventor, Samuel
F.B. Morse, 155 years ago: ``What hath God wrought?''

The message, sent from Globe Wireless' KFS Marine station at Half Moon
Bay south of San Francisco, marked a muffled end to the U.S. tradition
of
commercial radio telegraphy, famous for the dots and dashes of Morse
Code,company official Tim Gorman said Tuesday.

``The satellite started coming in the early 1980s, and there were great
advances in voice radio and radio telex,'' Gorman told Reuters.
``But there was nothing over all those years that could replace Morse
Code for its simplicity and reliability.''

Globe Wireless gathered several old-time telegraph operators for a
Small ceremony marking the event, the gleaming telegraph key now
surrounded by banks of computers and video screens used for more modern
forms of communications.

``It's a sad event for me, but I know it's for the best,'' said Dalton
Bergstedt, 92, a one-time manager of the Half Moon Bay facility. ``It
will improve maritime communications (to be) much better than they ever
were.''

After Morse invented the telegraph, he devised Morse code for use with
His new invention. In 1844, testing the new system, he telegraphed the
Words ``What hath God wrought?'' from Washington D.C. to an assistant in
Baltimore.

The telegraph and Morse Code quickly became the backbone of
long-distance communications around the globe.

Perhaps the most famous single Morse Code message was the distress call
sent by the foundering Titanic in 1912--``Come at once. We have
struck an iceberg''.

As maritime traffic rose and through two World Wars, the simple
telegraph, known as ``continuous wave'' or ``CW'' transmission to the
experts,
remained a spare, cheap and effective means of communicating across
vast distances.

``If there's static and you get only half the letters in a Morse Code
message you can still make it out, but if you only hear half a
conversation, that's no good,'' said Gorman, who began working at KFS
Marine in the late 1970s.

Nevertheless, the last three decades have seen a major shift in
Maritime communication, and the radio telegraph's fate was sealed when
the
International Marine Organization, a U.N. agency, ordered commercial
ships to replace the telegraph with new technology dubbed the Global
Marine Distress and Safety System by February 1, 2000.

Instead of typing out the dots and dashes of the famous ''SOS'' signal,
communications officers on modern ships can simply push a button
indicating a specific problem: sinking, capsizing, dead in the
water.

Morse Code and the radio telegraph are currently used only by smaller
ships from developing countries, as well as certain Russian and
Chinese vessels, Gorman said.

The Globe Wireless station at Half Moon Bay, as well as other former
commercial radio telegraph facilities already taken off line, will
now be used for the company's new communications product--GlobeEmail,
company officials said.

Gorman said that before the final sign-off, KFS Marine did relay one
Last telegram from the National Liberty Ship Memorial, the SS
Jeremiah O'Brien, in San Francisco Bay to President Clinton in the
White House.

``The message was 95 words, and it took me six or eight minutes to copy
it,'' said Gorman, who took down the Morse Code message
from the ship. ``Then I just transmitted it to the White House via
e-mail.''