Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway
From: kaufman@neon.stanford.edu (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Telegraph History....Again!
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Date: 25 Sep 89 15:30:37 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 411, message 7 of 8

In article  Gabe Wiener  writes:

>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 -....).

That's because the telegraph code was American Morse, which cannot send
dashes.  Everything was dots, and the timing between them.  Telegraphs had
sounders, not buzzers.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@Neon.stanford.edu)

[Moderator's Note: In about two weeks, I am going to run a story about the
Western Union operator who was on duty in Chicago on the Sunday night of
the Great Fire, in 1871. He was interviewed by the [Chicago Tribune] thirty
years later, in 1901.   PT]