Using the Modern International Morse Code which differs slightly from the original Morse code, transmission of an English message consisting of 100 letters requires the transmission of approximately 940 units, where the duration of a dot equals one dot-unit, dash equals three the space between letters equals three dot-units. If instead if assigning symbols of the English language the symbols had assigned at random, the same message would require the transmission of approximately 1160 dot-units, an increase of about 23 per cent. This encoding technique represents the earliest application of statistical compression for data transmission and permits almost one – quarter additional messages on a telegraph line during a rush period than if dot-and-dash assignments were done in a random manner.