A ‘word’ in telegraphy was 5 characters (and a space). Telegraph workers weren’t stupid enough to fall for tricks like this; they would just charge you for the extra words. According to relatives who remember this, the operator wouldn’t charge extra for normal words, until they got past 10 characters. Like the name Christopher was 10 characters, but they usually counted that as 1 word. Somewhat depended on how friendly you were with the operator, in a small town.
Great Christ, what an awful job. I can’t imagine doing that day in, day out.
When my Uncle was killed learning to fly, My Grandmother received a telegram. A second telegram told her that the body would be sent with some of his classmates to oversee transportation. That, too, is some rotten duty.
I’m confused by your comment - what do you no longer believe?
This sounds plausible.
As a ham radio operator, I keyed “BT” thousands of times, and it just rolls off the telegraph key with ease, super fast and succinct. It’s much easier to key than the aforementioned “.-.-.-” of the Morse “full stop”.
They were all about succinctness, so it would seem that something akin to BT (if not that code itself) was what was actually going over the wire.
Hawkeye (from MASH): “Dear Dad, I am not dead. Stop. Hope you are the same. Stop. Thinking of selling my golf clubs? Stop. Spending my insurance money? Stop.”
Don’t forget, at one time, telegrams were the best method of communicating short messages. They were fast (instant, plus hand delivery), cheap, and minimally subject to mangling due to poor transmission quality. Preferable to mail and phone calls in many cases, especially long distance sending.
Is there any reason to think that the period was actually transmitted as such rather than added by a human who received and typed the message? After all, the message also includes a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, even though Morse code is case-insensitive.
From a 1928 manual:
Punctuation Marks – Marks of punctuation, such as the comma, period, dash, colon, etc., are not transmitted in telegrams unless the sender specifically requests it, and then they are counted and charged for, as one word each. Quotation marks and parentheses, although composed. of two distinct characters each, are counted as one word. The companies have been prompted to adopt this policy because it requires almost as much effort to transmit a mark of punctuation as to send a short word, and unless attention is specifically called to punctuation marks by counting them in the “check,” there might be danger of their being overlooked. Messages in which the sender requests that marks of punctuation be transmitted are rare.
The accent mark used in the French, and some other foreign languages cannot be transmitted.
In the interest of great accuracy, it is desirable that the technical characters,
’ for feet
"for inches
% for percent
@ for at
should be written “feet,” “inches,” “percent,” “at,” etc.
Since marks of punctuation ordinarily are used in written correspondence and their omission may affect the sense of your communication, care must be exercised in the construction of a message from which they are to be excluded.
If you do not intend to stipulate that marks of punctuation be transmitted, write your message without punctuation and read it carefully to make sure that it is not ambiguous. If it seems impossible to convey your meaning clearly without the use of punctuation, use may be made of the celebrated word “stop,” which is known the world over as the official telegraphic or cable word for “period.”
This word “stop” may have perplexed you the first time you encountered it in a message. Use of this word in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission of the tiny dot or period.
Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word “stop,” to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out “comma,” “colon,” and “semi-colon.” The word “query” often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, “stop” has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams. It is interesting to note, too, that although the word is obviously English it has come into general use In all languages that are used in telegraphing or cabling.
“Stop” is of course never necessary at the end of a message.
Was this a Western Union manual?
The link is at the bottom of the post. So far as I can tell, yes. It explicitly mentions the rules for the Western Union Company and has no further references to other telegraph companies that I see.
It doesn’t name itself as being a product of Western Union, so that’s not 100%, but maybe it’s the product of a third company for people who wanted to become telegraphists for Western Union?
I always assumed there was a single character for period to make the transmission quick, but the printed telegram used “STOP” because a dot may not be obvious in the good old days before quality laser printers and the word stop was less ambiguous (like the discussion above about other punctuation).
So the word STOP was used instead of a period for clarity purposes during WWII and stuck, and it was free, compared to a period, which was charged for. A sort of loophole that everyone used and apparently Western Union was okay with it for some reason.
STOP was used for clarity during the First World War. There’s no evidence it was sent free.
I’ve not come across ordinary civilian telegrams where STOP was printed or typed in lieu of a period.
Just ran across this: https://web.archive.org/web/20090131123935/http://trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/BYTE.HTM
WHY IS A BYTE 8 BITS? OR IS IT
The punch card of IBM (others existed) had 12 rows and 80 columns. Each column was assigned to a symbol, a term I use here although they have fancier names nowadays because computers have been used in so many new ways.
… Then they started to need alphabets. This was accomplished by adding the 12 punch to the digits 1-9 to make letters A through I, the 11 punch to make letters J through R. For S through Z they added the 0 punch to the digits 2 through 9 (the 0-1 combination was skipped – 3x9=27, but the English alphabet has only 26 letters).
The first bonus was that the 12 and 11 punches without any 0-9 punch gave us the characters + and -. But no other punctuation was represented then, not even a period (dot, full stop) in IBM or telecommunication equipment. One can see this in early telegrams, where one said “I MISS YOU STOP COME HOME STOP”. “STOP” stood for the period the machine did not have.
Now, we’ve already established that Morse did have a period, and actually, I know that Baudot 6-bit telegraph code had a period. So Bemer, who is a Very Import Person in the history of codes, was more or less wrong about this. But… it’s certainly the case that early IBM equipment did not have a . character, and COBOL* was designed so that it could be punched and printed without using even the + and - characters. So perhaps it did have an effect on telegraphs.
*A very important early computer language. Telegraph is much older than computers.
I can see that the word STOP might be useful to structure a text, so as to provide a clear break between two sentences that could be confusing if they flowed one into the other without such a break. But if that’s the purpose, then I don’t see why a telegram would end with STOP. It’s not as if anything follows that the last sentence needs to be set apart from.
Because then you’ll know the message is over instead of communications being lost. It was telegraph, wires went down, repeaters stopped working, operators got distracted in the midst of sending, or many other problems could occur.
If that’s a serious objective, then the message should end with a word that unambiguously indicates the communication is over, rather than a word that is also used in the middle of a message. So I have my doubts about this theory.
Your logic is unassailable, but it is not an argument in favor of having a message end with no indication at all.
Well, we do have a straightforward advice made in the 1928 manual linked to by another user: “‘Stop’ is of course never necessary at the end of a message.”
For the purpose that you describe (making it unambiguous that a transmission is over and no response is expected), voice radio (called “radiotelephony” in official old-fashioned usage) has the word “out”, but I understand that it is commonly considered superfluous and hence not usually said.