The tiny piano that helped create digital code

A closer look

When your ISP throttles your bandwidth, you can quietly curse Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot. This French telegraph operator got so fed up with tapping out Morse code that in 1874 he invented a five-key telegraph console that looked suspiciously like a tiny piano. By pressing combinations of the five keys, he created a 5-bit binary code that could represent the alphabet, allowing multiple messages to multiplex over a single wire simultaneously. His brilliant electromechanical hack gave us the Baudot code—the granddaddy of ASCII—and his name was forever immortalized as the 'baud' rate.