POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE, Calif. — It has been a little more than a decade since the last of the nation’s commercial Morse code radio stations officially went off the air, as new technology sank a system that had been a lingua franca of maritime communication since before the Titanic.

But like transmissions that continue to travel through the cosmos long after their original senders are gone, there are some things that refuse to die. And on Tuesday, several outposts of Morse code blazed to life again, if only for a night, with the help of a group of enthusiasts bent on preserving what they call “the music of Morse,” one key tap at a time.

The occasion was an annual radio reboot known as the Night of Nights, held every year on the anniversary of the last Morse code broadcast from a coastal California station in 1999, which included a traditional sign-off (“We wish you fair winds and following seas”) and more than a few teary-eyed former radio operators.

On Tuesday, though, some of those old key men were back on the job, broadcasting from the former headquarters of a marine Morse station in Northern California, KPH, and joined on air by two other stations outside Seattle and in Mobile, Ala., all to honor a system that linked the world long before the Internet, e-mail and Twitter.