“TELETYPE, PLEASE.”

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 17 March 1925, Page 7

“TELETYPE, PLEASE.”

NEW WONDER OF TELEGRAPHY. AUTO EXCHANGES AND HIGHSPEED CARLES. A letter reaching Birmingham from London in two minutes. A message sent from, a British factory to Saji Francisco receiving a reply in ten minutes. Cables to America carrying messages at the rate of 500 words a minute in either direction simultaneously. These are. among the practical possibilities of telegraphy in the near future. A business man may dictate a letter to his typist, and at the same time as she is typing it, the letter will be transmitted through an automatic exchange <to the office of the person or firm for whom it is intended and typed there instantaneously. With new and wonderful cables it will be possible to communicate in this manner with any part of the world. These wonders were foreshadowed in a lecture on “Speeding up the Telegraphs,” given at the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Victoria Embankment, London, by Mr. Donald Murray.

“We must ‘teletype’ as well as ‘teletalk,’ ” said the lecturer. He referred to the world-wide complaints about the unsatisfactory condition of the telegraph service and the need foi; improving it and speeding it up until it takes its pro-* per place alongside the telephone. It was agreed, he said, that these complaints were well founded, and the telegraph service was desciibed as being dear, slow and inaccessible. Speeding-up the telegraphs and bringing them into closer touch with the industrial and financial life of the world was put forward as a necessity of the future. We must type as well as talk. \

The telegraph had many important advantages over the telephone, especially for communication ovei distances of more than fifty miles and the present ailment of the telegraph was diagnosed as excessive circuit facilities and defective termina facilities.

There were more circuits than were required for the traffic at present available, and not sufficient telegraph machinery, and the telegi-aph equipment was not arranged, like the telephone, so as to be linked up closely with the business life of the community. The telegraph was not, but should be, at every business man’s elbows, like the telephone. The remedy was the creation of the printing telegraph, or, more briefly, telegraph exchanges, giving telephone facilities we now enjoy. This will evidently, be the result, Mr. Murray added, of certain developments now taking place in America, where both the Western Union and the Rjl] Telephone Companies are about to offer telegraph typewriter services to business men

If that proved commercially, profitable, it would inevitably lead to the establishment of teletype exchanges in . all the American cities, and they would be linked up by trunk or longdistance telegraph lines. This would put business men all over the United States directly in touch with each other by printing telegraphy. In this way, the new telegraphy would be born. The lecturer prophesied that in the course of years this .new development would have a revolutionary effect on telegraph offices, which ' would become automatic switching exchanges, very like an automatic telephone exchange; and the telegraph operators, like -the telephone girls, were doomed to disappear, and their places would, be taken by a 'few telegraph engineers and mechanics wandering about in the deserted telegraph operating rooms, looking after the telegraph switching apparatus. The machine that had made this new -telegraphy possible was the start-stop telegraph printer; or teletype, provided with a typewriter keyboard which could be switched to any particular subscriber just as the telephone was connected at present.

It ought, he said, to be practicable for a- subscriber having one telephone line and a- teletype to ring up the Telephone Exchange and say “Teletypes.” He would then he plugged through the j teletype, section, by which he would be put in direct communication with his. correspondent, his message thus being typed at its destination and replied to at once. There would be teletype call offices at convenient places where it would be possible to use the teletype on terms similar to those on which the telephone was now used. The teletype had already been installed in the British telegraph service, and 'by the Eastern Telegraph Company, the Marconi Company, and stock and exahange brokers.

“In 15 or 20 years no business man will be able to afford to be without the four ‘TV—namely, one telephone, one teletype, one typewriter, and one typist,” said Mr. Murray. New and wonderful “Permalloy” cables were being made to give 300 words a. minute across the Atlantic instead of 30.

In future days, when there would be a dozen of the new “Permalloy” Atlantic cables in use, each working at 300 words a. minute in each direction simultaneously, there would be no difficulty in sending a message from any department of a manufacturing plant in this country to San Francisco or ,other American city and getting a reply within ten minutes Official steps were already being taken in England to test the new telegraph experimentally, and these tests would be followed in .all probability by practical trials. It had been stated, concluded the lecturer, that the telegraph would suffer from wireless and the air mail. He did not think so. Wireless was a remarkable substitute for telegraph and telephone wires and submarine cables, but a telegram was a telegram whether it was sent by wire or by wireless. ■ As regarded the competition of the air mail, a letter by means of the new telegraphy would pass between London and Birmingham in two minutes. Reckoning on 100 miles per hour for the aeroplane, the same letter would take one hour to reach its destination.