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Has anyone ever figured out what he's writing using the telegraph? I've tried decoding it but I'm having difficulties as he's talking over it. I'm not entirely certain, but when the scene opens I think he's writing 'ear' (which is done more or less in tandem with the dog's ears twitching), and later on when the dog puts his leg in his mouth I think he's writing 'eat' - I'm not an expert on morse though, so I could be entirely wrong. Any clues?

Actually, I think it may have been translated already. To review, when Steele wins the golden collar, he says: " To Juneau Daily Chronicle. Stop. Steele wins first place of season. Stop. Three time winner keeps golden collar. Stop. Nome. Stop". The same goes for the rest of the film. What was being said in the telegraph office went along with the film. I think this may have been a way for the writers to advance the story and add more detail.

Well, we know that's what viewers were meant to get from it, but that may not be what was actually tapped into the machine. I wouldn't be surprised if it was an Easter Egg of some kind - or just random beeping.

Easter in January? :/ But I stand by what I said in my previous post. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't see a reason for them to plop in a unrelated subject into the telegraph while talking about a subject that matches the storyline. Plus, they way they were talking is how is how they used to translate (or something like that. I don't know much about morse code). That's why I said " I think it may have been translated already".

No offense, but I hope the Easter in January thing was a joke.

As for them putting something unrelated in, the logic there is that people who go looking for "Easter Eggs" in movies would go to the trouble of translating it, whereas those who didn't care would be none the wiser and just assume that it was the same as what the man said. I'm not saying that's what it is, just that it could be the case. I'd have to go back and check to be sure one way or the other.

Right, I'm working under the pretense that what he's saying isn't what's actually being written on the machine. "To Juneau Daily Chronicle. Stop. Steele wins first place of season. Stop. Three time winner keeps golden collar. Stop. Nome. Stop" is a pretty long line, and would require a lot of tapping/beeps to write out, which we don't hear - as he's saying these lines, he's inputting not entire sentences, but single letters. Something tells me that if one were to go in and decipher it, it would probably write out some kind of silly message.

In addition to that, the typing begins shortly before he even starts talking, during which I've determined (perhaps erroneously) he's writing "EAR", which in morse looks like this: . .- .-. and you can listen to that here http://morsecode.scphillips.com/cgi-bin ... IAAo8BAg==
You can also juxtapose that with the opening of the video here: http://youtu.be/__BHFqelj_k

If someone were to go in and listen carefully, it would be cool to know what the exact morse code boils down to, or if it's just a bunch of random letters; but this would be a perfect spot in a film to put in some kind of secret message, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

UPDATE. Alright guys, I went into Audacity and I viewed the audio to the film clip as a spectrogram, as seen here (the horizontal white lines near the bottom represent the telegraph):

I then proceeded to generate sine-wave tones over the appropriate locations so that I could get an isolated version of the telegraph's sound, and you can listen to that here: http://puu.sh/c5rvJ.mp3

Unfortunately when I tried to translate it, I didn't get much - it appears that it's just random letters/gibberish. I have a couple different variants of it, but these are the results I got:
1. E A R E C T F O D A K T A O E A E A K E
2. E A R E C T F O T E E A K T A O E A E A K E

Well, that's disappointing.

It is! ^^ but I'm still curious. I'm going to decode the other morse scene (where they're shipping the antitoxin) and see what I get. It's probably also gibberish, but that's not going to stop me from further investigation.

Okay, so as it happens the music and the voices are so heavy over that section of film that it's nearly impossible for me to pick up the morse either by ear or on Audacity's spectrogram, but as the camera pans over to Morris (the telegraph operator's dog with the twitching ears), we can see his ears moving, and while this is going on I observed his ears twitching to something of the effect of - .-. .- .. -., which in morse spells "TRAIN"; but after Morris lifts his head it seems to go back into gibberish again, with something that looks like "DOWAT". Though DOWAT backwards looks almost like TOWARD, I wouldn't count that as anything significant. Methinks TRAIN is the most we're going to get out of this film's morse, and one might not even count that, as I was decoding it visually by a dog's ear movement without any reliable audio of the telegraph to listen to. If anyone else wants to go in and try to decode these scenes, they're welcome to. ^^ Myself, I'm calling it quits on this project for now.

That's interesting. I never would over thought of trying to decode that.

That is certainly unfortunate, given the fact that several of the key telegraph communications between Nome and other locations are preserved in the historical record.

One of the most important telegraph messages was the first, sent by Dr. Welch (or for him under his instructions):

"An epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here. Stop. I am in urgent need of one million units of diphtheria antitoxin, stop, mail is only form of transportation. Stop. I have made application to Commissioner of Health of the Territories for antitoxin already. Stop. There are about 3000 (sic) white natives in the district."

That the writers and producers, instead, simply settled for a string of gibberish is typical of Hollywood production values, and very depressing.

They should have hired you.

While I do concur that they should have tried to keep certain things like that historically accurate, if they were to insert the full message into the film it would have taken a full 5 minutes to write out (presuming they were typing at a similar speed as in the film), if not longer. In a film that's about an hour and fifteen minutes long, that's a huge chunk of the film's playing time (6.7% to be precise). From a movie goer's perspective, that would seem highly obnoxious, and I don't think most people (kids especially, them being the target audience) would sit through five minutes' worth of morse code; it would have been a drawn out scene of nothing but perplexity for the viewers, and it likely would have hurt the film's ratings. There's a difference between slow pacing in a film, wherein every minute does something in the film's favour (such as establishing the characters, atmosphere/mood, the setting), and inserting a five minute break into an otherwise fast paced kids' film for the sake of historical accuracy.

I don't disagree with what you're saying; it would have been nice if they had tried to keep things accurate as possible - but the full message would be unreasonable considering the film. In a more historically accurate piece, a scene like that might slip by if done properly. The least they could have done (without breaking the pacing) would be to have some kind of short message that was pertinent, such as "HELP NOME." or something to that effect; maybe a small portion of the actual message, even.

Given that I am also a "movie goer", I still differ with your analysis of how long it would have played out, and whether or not it would have been distracting. Nevertheless, even if it were possible that it played out for an actual five minutes, if the full message were considered, I think we both know that Spielberg would have simply done with this what he did with pretty much every other historical aspect of the movie...changed it to suit the production overall. Either they would have shortened it, or would have changed it altogether (in a sense they did...just to absolute gibberish, apparently).


Frankly, in the grand scheme, it doesn't really matter whether or not they did insert the real message. 99% of the people who watched this movie are either not going to care, or would find it a bit too tedious to sit there and try to work this out. And maybe a bit like picking nits over what is nothing more than a children's animated movie.


No criticism is meant of what effort you put into trying to find this out. It's impressive that you actually spent the time on it. But I think you're probably one of a VERRRRY small percentage of people who might have even bothered or cared. Especially given the fact that, considering the movie as a whole (especially given its tagline of "the true story of an American hero"), it ran utterly roughshod over the actual history of the events it purports to portray.