History
Prior to spelling alphabets, the words used to indicate English letters were "a", "bee", "cee", "dee", "e",.... Their sounds are difficult to discriminate orally, hence the invention of telephone alphabets, and eventually radio alphabets, used by militaries. Confusion of the oral indication of letters is not dangerous in most common situations, but in the military it can have lethal consequences. Prior to radio and telephone, telegraph required no telephone alphabet because morse code served the same purpose and did not rely on human utterance of letters.
British Army signallers began using a partial spelling alphabet in the late 19th century. First recorded in 1904 this system differentiated only letters most frequently misunderstood: Ack Beer (or Bar) C D E F G H I J K L eMma N O Pip Q R eSses Toc U Vic W X Y Z. This alphabet was the origin of phrases such as "ack-ack" (A.A. for anti-aircraft), "pip-emma" for pm and Toc H for Talbot House. It was developed on the Western Front of the First World War and later formally codified to provide a phonetic equivalent for all 26 letters (see comparative tabulation of military alphabets before 1956).
For the general populace, and finance professionals in particular, entries such as "November" for the letter N and "Kilo" for the letter K were considered too long or obscure, and an alternative alphabet arose. Common first names were a popular choice, and as a result the First Name Alphabet, first compiled by the financial firm JSC, has become quite commonly used.
Read more about this topic: Spelling Alphabets
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)