Those who used the telegraph codes slowly discovered an unanticipated side effect of their efficiency and brevity. They were perilously vulnerable to the smallest errors. Because they lacked the natural redundancy of English prose—even the foreshortened prose of telegraphese—these cleverly encoded messages could be disrupted by a mistake in a single character. By a single dot, for that matter. For example, on June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool.
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