That’s right: Happy Birthday Samuel Morse. You hadn’t forgot your Morse Code, had you?

Morse’s birthday was actually yesterday, and Google celebrated it with a confusing trick to many, reskinning the Google homepage with a morse code logo. There probably couldn’t have been a better celebration of his life, than putting his stamp on what is one of the largest information exchanges in the world.

Google is really getting into the birthday spirit. Last week, it celebrated William Shakespeare’s birthday with a cartoon logo.

The Telegraph has more:

Visitors to the search engine’s home page this morning were met with the code “–. — — –. .-.. .” instead of the usual Google logo.

The witty doodle is intended to honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the single wire telegraph, who was born on April 27, 1791.

The talented painter who was admitted into the Royal Academy, Morse only turned his hand to inventing in 1832, after meeting an expert in electromagnetism on a sea voyage.

He later patented his idea for a transmitting messages over electrical wires, which quickly became the standard method of swift long-distance communication. Every letter of the alphabet was translated into a combination of dots and dashes in the code to which he gave his name.

Google regularly releases versions of its logo to mark major world events and anniversaries. It is particularly keen to honour scientific discoveries, and has in the past produced doodles to herald the launch of the Large Hadron Collider and the birthdays of Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.