Tommy Gore, age 8, or High Point, North Carolina, for his question:

How dial SOS come to mean HELP?

Morse code signals are long and short taps. The short ones are called dots and the long ones are dashes. Each letter has certain dots and dashes arranged just so. There are spaces between so that the words do not get jumbled together. However, some messages are easier to tap out than others. And when a person needs help, he may forget how to tap out something complicated.

This is why the SOS signal was invented. It is three dots, three dashes and three more dots. This is very easy to tap out, even when a person needs help in a hurry. Actually the message isn't related to the letters. Three dots stand for letter "S" and three dashes "S" and three dashes stand for letter "0". So the easy dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot are called SOS, even when everybody knew they meant "HELP."