Teletype

Origins

The mechanical typewriter was developed in 1867 and was in large-scale U.S. production within a decade, directed primarily at government and business office use. In telegraph offices, operators would listen to the Morse sounder and directly type plain language messages (transcription) onto telegram forms for hand delivery to recipients. Developing a means of mechanizing that transfer would greatly speed up communication.

American engineer Charles Krum began to develop such a device, with financial support from Jay Morton of the Morton Salt Company. To exploit their efforts, the Morkrum Company was founded in 1906 to make Krum's machines, into which an operator would type alphanumeric characters. [Page 1383]New York and Boston were linked in 1910 and the Associated Press began to transmit news to competing New York newspapers four years later. Other news agencies followed suit.

By 1918, the company employed 200 people. The first general purpose teletype that used that name in marketing appeared in 1922. In 1925, a merger between Morkrum and Kleinschmidt Electric Company created the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company, which in 1929 became the Teletype Corporation. Some 25,000 teletypes had been sold by this point. In 1930, Teletype Corp was purchased by AT&T and became a subsidiary of its Western Electric manufacturing arm.

For much of the twentieth century, teleprinters (the European term; in the United States, they were called teletypes after the American company that made them) were employed extensively by news agencies and businesses in general. In 1925, the Press Association, the domestic British news agency, began to use a teleprinter network to serve London-based daily newspapers. By 1929, the Reuters and Havas news agencies inaugurated the use of teleprinter networks to service, respectively, Europe and Latin America. But expansion across national borders was often slow due to developing technical standards, overall cost, and agreements on tariffs for journalists and other users.

Concurrently developed with these expanding teleprinter networks was telex (or TWX in AT&T parlance). Starting in the 1930s, large telecommunication carriers began to develop systems that used telephone-like rotary dialing to connect teleprinters. These new devices were called “telex,” (combining teleprinter and exchange), and they sent code in a system of automated message routing. The first wide-coverage automatic public telex network was implemented in Berlin and Hamburg by the German post office in 1932 and was quickly followed by other technically capable nations before World War II. Although often expensive, telex aided foreign correspondents in getting stories back to their news agencies or papers.

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