Telegraphists & faster technology

Last week I looked at the development of the telegraph.  The original Morse telegraph printed code on  punched tape, with the operator, by striking one of three operating plungers - one for the dot, one for the dash, and one for the space -  with small rubber tipped mallets, one in each hand.  The operator also had to move the tape at the same time, which could be slow and tiresome, despite the fact that a trained Morse operator able to transmit 40 to 50 words per minute.

"The telegraph operator is brain work, requiring close and unremitting application", as one professor summed it up. "The mental effort involved in receiving (morse code) from a sounder was exactly similar to that in which a shorthand writer was engaged when reporting a speaker verbatim, and it took as long to train a good telegraph operator as a good reporter."

Telegraphists were an elite group - usually well educated, in city and suburban post and telegraph offices, they occupied a position between the working classes of telegraph messenger, letter carrier and postal sorter, and the managerial classes of supervisor, postmaster and superintendent.  Usually men, especially in Australia, they showed their middle class alliance by dressing fashionably - gloves and brightly coloured waistcoats, even in the desert, such as in  Eucla in West Australia, where the men wore flannel trousers, white shirts, ties and the ornate waistcoats.

source

In 1855 American David Hughes designed a printing telegraph system, the first to print text onto paper.  It was in production until 1914.  It was a rival to the Baudot  system developed in the 1870s, with the piano key layout required minimal training for the operators. Messages were printed on paper tape by the type-wheel arrangement visible at the back. Power was supplied by a weight and pulleys underneath.

Hughes telegraph. Manufactured by Siemens und Halske, Germany

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Donald Murray had a vision of a teletypewriter, apparently from looking at typewriters and cable-copy machines while working as a journalist with The New Zealand Herald in Auckland in 1887 - he thought that anyone could learn to type on a standard 'QWERTY' keyboard. In 1898, when his ideas had taken a practical form, he went to New York where he joined the staff of the Postal Cable Company.  By May 1899, Murray had worked out the mechanism for his design which set type by telegraph by connecting the keyboard to telegraph machinery, and applied for a US patent.  For his first US patent, Murray wrote, “My invention relates to improvements in printing telegraph apparatus, and is designed, by means of a transmitting device provided with an ordinary keyboard, such as the Remington, to operate at a distant station any ordinary typewriter …”

The Murray Keyboard, source

In late 1899 Murray sought a financial backer for his venture in New York. Unfortunately during transit to the US from Australia his system arrived at the New York office of Scientific American smashed into little pieces.  Murray was able to patch it up and successfully demonstrate it. Scientific American wrote that the Murray system was “without rival” for long telegraph lines, underground cables and press messages. They also  described the printer “as a sort cross between a sewing machine and a barrel organ”, as it was worked by the operator turning a handle.  It was dubbed by popular media as “Murray’s coffee mill” and the “Australian sausage machine”.

Murray's system in action

Murray then took his 'Murray Automatic Printing Telegraphy System'  to London.  For a short time he worked at the UK General Post Office, while further developing his  system of printing telegraphy.  He left the GPO in 1909 having established a Telegraph Engineering factory in London and he sold a number of his installations to Germany, Austria, Russia and Sweden, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand.   For more information on Donald Murray go to the excellent blog, Oz Typewriter.

In 1900, Canadian, Fredrick Creed also experimented with a faster way to send Morse code. His idea was for a typewriter style machine that would enable complete Morse code signals to be punched in the tape simply by operating the corresponding character keys.  Creed went to Scotland, and in a garden shed in Glasgow he transformed an old typewriter bought for fifteen shillings into his prototype keyboard perforator, operated by compressed air and controlled by a keyboard.  In 1902 the General Post office placed an order for 12 machines. 

With the aid of a small team of mechanics Mr Creed produced two further machines. These were a receiving perforator (reperforator), which recorded the incoming signals in a perforated tape identical with that used at the other end of the line for transmission; and a printer which accepted the received message tape and decoded it into plain language printed characters on ordinary paper tape. Thus was born the "Creed High Speed Automatic Printing Telegraphy System", later known in offices all over the world under the name of Telex. 

Creed joined with Harald Bille, a well known Danish telegraph engineer, in 1912 and the company of Creed, Bille was formed, increasing the workforce grew to 72.  That same year the Daily Mail became the first newspaper in the world to adopt the Creed System, and shortly the entire contents of the newspaper were being transmitted daily from London to Manchester for simultaneous publication.  Other newspapers shortly followed this lead and export business began to develop with orders from telegraph administrations and companies in Denmark, India, Australia, South Africa and Sweden.

From the Creed factory in Croydon, the Post Office Perforator No1 was used to prepare Telex tape off line. A character counter caused the lamp on the left to light when a line of text was nearly full, allowing the operator to enter a carriage return and line feed at the appropriate point. source

Like most technology at that time, many people were working on the same idea from different angles, so it;s' difficult to appropriate credit to each of the inventors concerned, but Murray and Creed were part of an amazing group of engineers  and inventors who revolutionised telegraphy.   Teleprinter,tele-typewriters or telex's opened telegraphy to broader use.  By adapting it to the typewriter, which was then becoming a standard business machine, it could be operated by less-skilled personnel, and basically anyone could operate one - even blind people and women!

Blind stenographer works with a dicta-phone & type writer, c. 1913

In 1913, British telegraph traffic peaked in volume with 82 million telegrams transmitted, but in the relatively short interval of the next 21 years, patronage declined and had dropped to 35 million telegrams per annum.  Also in 1913 America's Western Union developed multiplexing, which it made possible to transmit eight messages simultaneously over a single wire (four in each direction).  In the UK Creed was experimenting with high speed automatic telegraphy by wireless. Messages were successfully transmitted via an aerial on the roof of the company  to  Creed’s home about three miles away. The experiments had to be discontinued on the outbreak of the First World War, when the aerial was dismantled on Government order.

Automatic transmission would be introduced in 1914, and would allow around 20 messages to be transmitted at once, however experiments in wireless technology were suspended in the UK until after the war. WWI did allow more Australian women to assume telegraph positions previously held by men, although women had been doing the job quite successfully for some time by then.  There were women telegraph operators during the American Civil war, which you can read more about here.

Woman Telegraph Operator Lizzy Harding. It was made in 1917 by Harris & Ewing.

Deb xx

A brief history of the telegraph in Australia

 
If you’ve read or seen Terry Pratchett’s Disc World series, and Going Postal in particular, you will understand what a shutter semaphore tower is.  Semaphore lines, or optical telegraphs, that sent messages to a distant observer through line-of-sight signals existed in Europe from as early as 1792, and there were also instruments such as the heliograph used from the 19th century, that use the suns rays for signalling.

Signalling with heliograph near Monument 92. Alaska - Canada border c. 1910

 In the early 1850s businesses were pressing the government to find a quicker method of communication in Victoria.  Finally in 1853 a decision was made to investigate the possibilities of the electric telegraph,  and coincidently at the same time a young Irish-Canadian engineer named Samuel Walker McGowan landed in Melbourne.  McGowan had studied and worked in the USA with Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse electric telegraph who had made his first successful trial of the technology in the US in May 1844 with his famous message, "What hath God wrought."   Morse, a professor of arts and design at the University of the City of New York, had been inspired to develop his telegraph by the electrical work of Professor Joseph Henry of the Albany Academy in New York and the first electric telegraph invented by Schilling in 1832.  In the US by 1854 there was already 23,000 miles of line.  Morse encouraged McGowan to head for Australia to try to establish the telegraph there, as the Victorian Gold Rush saw great wealth and expansion, in that colony sending with him an experienced telegraphist and a quantity of telegraph equipment.
     
Morse and his telegraph c. 1844 , and his receiver used for the demonstration

How did it work? From Museum Victoria:
Telegraph signals were transmitted by an operator who depressed a key to complete an electric circuit and transmit current along the telegraph line. Releasing the key broke the circuit and cut off the current. Letters and numbers were represented by a sequence of short current pulses ('dots') and long current pulses ('dashes'), transmitted according to a defined code. The most widely used code was generally known as "Morse code".
At the receiving end of the telegraph line, the incoming current pulses passed to the receiving instrument, or 'sounder'. Two vertical wire coils were energised by the received pulses, causing the metal arm across the top of the coils to move up and down. The movement of the arm could be heard as a succession of metallic clicks. The interval between the clicks was short in response to the short current pulse representing a 'dot', or long in response to the long current pulse representing 'dash'. A skilled operator could interpret the succession of clicks as a pattern of dots and dashes and immediately decode the letters and numbers in the received message.
  
Telegraph Sounder – c. 1860s

Hugh Childers, the Collector of Customs, who had been pressing for the introduction of the electric telegraph arranged for McGowan to demonstrate his equipment in Melbourne. McGowan then won the contract to erect 'a line of electric telegraph between Melbourne and Williamstown' and the first electric telegraph line in Victoria (and the first in Australia) opened for business in March, 1854, funded by the government but privately constructed.  
 
How Morse code developed.

The telegraph network made it possible to communicate quickly - something that is taken for granted today – rather than sending messages by coach, pigeon, pony express or rail, but it was slow to catch on, as not everyone trusted information which had arrived via cable.  Some newspapers, for example, refused to print news which had arrived via cable as they doubted its truth, relying instead on pigeon post and human delivery. Reuters changed all this by setting up his "Submarine Telegraph" office in  1851 getting the ‘scoop’ on all international news.  One of the early important messages transmitted by telegraph in Australia was the first account to reach Melbourne of the Eureka rebellion on the gold fields at Ballarat in 1854.  The following year the line from Melbourne to Queenscliff was completed and the more shipping information and European news was made available.

The post telegraph office at Cloncurry, Queensland, c. 1912. There is a man up the telegraph pole in the centre of the photograph. source

 In 1856 Victoria, NSW and South Australia agreed to collaborate on establishment of an intercolonial telegraph network, as messages going across colonial borders initially involved operators in one colony  transcribing a message which was then physically handed to a counterpart in the second colony for transmission over that colonies wire.  South Australia also installed its first line in Adelaide.

Murtoa Court House and Post Office building, Victoria, c. 1890. Five men stand outside the post office while a sixth man, a woman and a small girl stand at the right. source

In Tasmania Hobart and Launceston were linked in 1857.  Adelaide and Melbourne were linked in 1858, the year in which the first NSW line was activated, and a Sydney-Melbourne link was in place by November 1858. The first line in Queensland was activated in April 1861, with a connection to Sydney in November of that year. The first transcontinental line in the US dates from the same year.

Scottsdale Post and Telegraph Office, Victoira 1906

By 1867 there were 1,676 miles of line within Victoria, handling 122,138 messages (compared to around 7.92 million in the US and 5.78 million in the UK that year).  Western Australia did not have its first line until 1869, but by 1875 a link between Adelaide and Perth was established. In 1872 the 2,900 kilometre Adelaide to Port Darwin link (the Overland Telegraph Line or OTL) was installed at a cost of £300,000.  This allowed fast communication between Australia and the rest of the world, via Singapore, and was one of the great engineering feats of 19th century Australia.The Batavia (Jakarta) to Broome link was completed in 1889, with a link to Perth via the Cocos-Keeling Islands in 1901.

Planting the first telegraph pole, for the OTL, near Palmerston (Darwin) on 15 September 1870, source

By 1876 there were over 8,000 miles of line in Queensland alone. By 1900 virtually everyone in Australia had access to the telegraph, but they were still expensive (the cost per word for a message from London was at that time equivalent to the average weekly wage) and usually kept for special occasions such as births and deaths.  These telegraph messages sent by an electrical telegraph operator or telegrapher using Morse code  was known as a telegram.  A cablegram was a message sent by a submarine telegraph cable, often shortened to a cable or a wire, and I’ll look at these next time.

Telegram sent from Doncaster to Heidelberg in 1900 by J. W. Jenvey to S. W. Chambers giving information about wireless transmission experiments.

Deb xx