I was recently re-reading "V for Vendetta" and a character points out that the anarchist known as "V" uses Beethoven's 5th symphony to cover his speech in an audio recording and that the rhythm of the opening notes to Beethoven's 5th constitute the Morse Code symbol for the letter "V".
A little light Wikipedia research says that this synergy between the symphony and Morse Code is likely coincidental, but would anybody be able to shed any light on it?
I don't think so.
The convention when numbering symphonies is to use Arabic numerals. It's typically written as "Symphony No 5". Roman numerals were sometimes used for movements and for discussing harmony, but not for symphonies.
The choice of encoding for Morse code was very deliberate. Since a dot takes one third the time to transmit as a dash, and a short code takes less time than a longer code, an encoding that picks the most frequent letters to make the shortest sounds allows faster transmission.
For this reason E is a dot and T is a dash, being the two most frequent. Letters like Q Z and J have low frequency and get longer encodings.
It happens that B and V have roughly the same frequency and ended up with similar encodings. B is dash-dot-dot-dot while V is dot-dot-dot-dash. If it were meant as a tribute why would Samuel Morse say "Hey, lets convert the 5 into a roman numeral and then make V sound like the symphony." It would have been simpler to say "B is for Beethoven".
So.... Unless someone can find it in the diaries of Samuel Morse, I'm skeptical.
Incidentally, 20th century students of Morse code were told NOT to think of the symphony when transmitting a V because they tended to slow down to the tempo of the music.
[For those who were confused, as I was, Morse code for "V" is dot, dot, dot, dash. Which mimics the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.]