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From: davef@brspyr1.brs.com (Dave Fiske)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Telegraph History....Again!
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Date: 29 Sep 89 21:19:47 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 421, message 7 of 8

In article , gabe@sirius.ctr.columbia.
edu (Gabe Wiener) writes:
> With all this talk of Western Union history and whatnot, I thought that
> these little anecdote might be appropriate.

> When Thomas A. Edison was a teenager in the 1860's, he used to work in
> a telegraph office.  At one point, he was assigned to work the
> graveyard shift.  Now in those days, a telegraph operator would have
> to send a six over the line (represented at the time by the morse
> signal ......, although the MODERN morse signal is -....).  Anyway,
> there was very little traffic over the circuits in those days was very
> light in the wee hours.  Now it is a well known fact that Tom Edison
> liked to sleep during his work.  However, he was often admonished for
> nodding off durning his operating hours when he failed to send the
> six.  So he rigged a six notched gear to the movement of a nearby
> clock, and whenever the clock would reach the hour, the gear would
> promptly roll over the telegraph key sending the six, and permitting
> Edison to get a good night's sleep.

Here's another anecdote about a famous person's work at a telegraph
office.

As a boy, Andrew Carnegie worked delivering telegrams.  Apparently, in
the early days, they did not believe that people could learn to read
the telegraph by ear.  They had a stylus attached to the "clicker",
which drew lines on a strip of paper which was moved along the
instrument.  As the paper moved along, an incoming dot lifted the
stylus up to make sort of a short rectangle on the paper; a dash made a
long rectangle.  A man would go over the strip of paper afterward, and
"read" the message, type it out, and give it to a boy to be delivered.

Carnegie mentions in his autobiography, that, from hanging around in
the office, hearing the incoming clicks, and reading the messages
before delivering them, he gradually learned to decode the messages in
his head.  Apparently this gave him an advantage, in that he knew the
message even before the official "interpreter".  I guess he could call out
the message as it came in, and the other guy could just type it out,
without having to look at the strip.

Anyway, eventually they figured out that people could learn to read the
clicks by ear.


"ANGRY WOMEN BEAT UP SHOE SALESMAN   Dave Fiske  (davef@brspyr1.BRS.COM)
 WHO POSED AS GYNECOLOGIST"
                                     Home:  David_A_Fiske@cup.portal.com
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