TITLE: KEY — a wire to nowhere
PROMPT: Build 'KEY — a wire to nowhere', a telegraph station: a brass morse key on a walnut desk, a sounder that clacks physically with each mark, a paper tape that punches your dots and dashes as it feeds, and a distant station that answers your CQ with its own fist (randomly timed, human-imperfect rhythm). Palette: brass, walnut, oiled steel, tape cream. Interactions: tap the key (spacebar or the brass knob) — sounder clacks (WebAudio, gesture-gated), lamp glows, tape prints; a decoder reads your timing into letters live; SPEED and spacing guides teach you with a practice phrase trainer; the far station replies with a decodable message typed on a slip; the wire stretches across the page as a sagging line humming faintly. Rhythmic, tactile, old-technologies romance.
DESCRIPTION: A 1912 telegraph desk under warm lamp light: a draggable-feel brass key (knob or SPACE) drives a physical sounder arm, glow lamp, and a feeding paper tape that prints · and — with auto-scroll. A live decoder measures your keying rhythm — dit under 140ms, dah over, letter gap at 700ms — and types out letters (with ? for mangled fists). A sagging copper wire crosses the desk carrying an animated hum pulse; after fourteen of your marks, the distant station answers with a randomly-timed, human-imperfect CQ reply (GN OM, R R, 73…) that clacks the sounder, punches the tape, and lands as a typed italic slip. A practice trainer plays SOS on the sounder with proper timing. All audio is a filtered 620Hz square wave with fast attack/release envelopes.
TECHNIQUES: morse encode/decode tables with timing-threshold classification (dit/dah/letter-gap), WebAudio gated tone with setTargetAtTime envelopes, physical sounder arm and lamp choreography, auto-scrolling punched-tape strip, far-station sequencer with randomized human rhythm, key-count-triggered replies, wire SVG with animated stroke-dashoffset hum pulse.
INTERACTION: Tap the brass knob (or SPACE / keyboard on the knob) to key the wire; hold for dahs; the decoder spells your letters live; after ~14 marks the far station answers; the SOS trainer demonstrates proper timing on the sounder.