The Backslash in Morse code.

[Tadfafty]

I have a Morse code keyboard from 1912-1945 era which has keyboard rather than just a single button/paddles. There is a key "\" that produces .-..- But I can't find any information on the use of this character.

 

[Ham4CW]

Welcome to the forum!

There's a few non-English characters that use .-..- to represent them, if you have a look down the list here >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Letters,_numbers,_punctuation,_prosigns_for_Morse_code_and_non-English_variants you can find a few of them.

Having said that, I would guess that maybe the manufacturer of the keyboard you have night have just been going for the obvious in the absence of an 'official' sequence of code for a back-slash. A forward-slash is -..-. and so a back-slash, which is the mirror image of the forward slash could be represented by the mirror image of the code too. So -..-. when reversed becomes .-..-

Another possibility is that it is a prosign of some description that might be peculiar to a branch of the armed forces, and the back-slash key may have just been a convenient 'button' to use to trigger that particular sequence sequence of code.

It could also be that the keyboard represents one half of an encode-decode system, and maybe there was a matching decoder that would interpret the .-..- sequence as a back-slash, thus allowing the combined system to replicate a full QWERTY keyboard, including additional punctuation and special characters (a clue to this would be if the keyboard has code sequences for other characters such as say % ! | and so on.

My money is still on the obvious one, that .-..- is a mirror image of -..-.  bd

73, Mark...

 

[Tadfafty]

This machine is actually the oldest appearance of a backslash known by a group attempting to research the history of the backslash.

 

[Ham4CW]

I found this while searching the web >>> https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/b/backslash.htm

On there it says that:-

Alternatively referred to as a backward slash, downward slash, and reverse solidus, the backslash is a character ( \ ) first introduced by Bob Bemer in 1960.

If we jump to Bob Bemer's page >>> https://www.computerhope.com/people/bob_bemer.htm it mentions (among other things that:-

Known as the father of ASCII, Bob Bemer helped develop the ASCII character code set and introduced several new characters including the Escape character, backslash, and the curly bracket.

73, Mark...