In the mid 80s, the company I worked for still operated Telex machines. The Telex address was on all contract documents, but the other reason was for communications from foreign companies – international post was slow and flaky, phone lines weren’t good and hard copy was required.
Telex was the point-to-point development of Telegraph: Telegraph addresses became Telex addresses.
As I remember, the way Telex and Fax worked was that you kept records of everything you sent and received. You could lie and forge your records, but generally a demonstrable practice of keeping true records of everything was evidence that any particular piece of physical evidence was good: your staff would swear that the telex transmission records you had weren’t forged, (fax machines and telex machines would give you printed transmission and rx records, and you also filed the documents ) and, absent evidence of criminal practice, that was good enough in court.
I got a telegram in 1993 when I got my Eagle Scout, from a distant relative. I think their hope was that I’d get something special delivered to the house. I only got the phone call.
That depended a lot on the line you were using. In particularly valuable lines - either intercity connections between major hubs that carried a lot of traffic, or submarine cables - it ended very early; having a human Morse operator would have been a waste of precious time and communication capacity on the line. An early innovation to change that was the Wheatstone system of the 1860s, whereby several human operators would encode the messages that had to be transmitted onto a punched paper stripe, and then that stripe would be fed through a reading device that was hooked up to the actual telegraph cable. On the receiving end the messages were recorded on a printed paper strip and then decoded. On less busy lines, the Morse system with human operators directly tapping onto the wire by hand persisted much longer.
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In the mid 80s, the company I worked for still operated Telex machines.
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Back then I worked for a company that had customers all over the world. My job was to deal with orders for spare parts for our machines. Most orders came by post, but some urgent orders were phoned in.
Telephone calls from some countries were both expensive and problematic. We did good business in Cuba and Brazill for example as well as several African countries. Those customers used Telex for preference. Our Telex machine produced ‘ticker-tape’ (the stuff you see showered from windows onto Wall Street parades). The paper ribbon was fed into another machine that converted it into type.
We combined both machines in one physical unit. The ‘receptionist’ (a job more skilled than it sounds) would type messages onto tape, then send the message by playing the tape – I don’t know how telex worked, but she wasn’t on line hunting for keys or making typing mistakes while the message was being sent.
Our incoming messages were directly printed – the telex company must have decided that printers were sufficiently cheap and reliable that you didn’t have to run them offline. There was the tape punch, for preparing messages, so perhaps the machine could be configured to punch first – I was never entrusted with operation.
Our machine was worked by an operator during the day and she would type messages directly into the sender. If I wanted to send a message out of hours, I would make a punch-tape first and check it, before transmission. This was partly to avoid typos but more importantly to cut connection time to a minimum.
The whole point of Morse’s system, as he saw it, was that it provided a written record of the message, and, at first, he stipulated that any clerks found reading the messages by listening to the clicking of the printer were instantly dismissed.
That website is fascinating. Although they suggest using telegrams for things like weddings and funerals, it looks like their business model is based on contract cancellations.
I wonder how they handle message delivery. Their site has a photo of a motorcycle with the company logo on it, but I would assume they outsource it to local courier services. If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d be tempted to send myself a telegram just to see what would happen.
I believe you are mixing up two different technogies. “Ticker tape,” invented in 1870, was always a printed medium.
It consisted of a paper strip that ran through a machine called a stock ticker, which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. The term “ticker” came from the sound made by the machine as it printed.
Punched tape was used as a way of storing messages for teletypewriters. Operators typed in the message to the paper tape, and then sent the message at the maximum line speed from the tape. This permitted the operator to prepare the message “off-line” at the operator’s best typing speed, and permitted the operator to correct any error prior to transmission. An experienced operator could prepare a message at 135 words per minute (WPM) or more for short periods.
Teletypewriters with punched tape writer/readers only became widespread starting in 1930, whereas the first ticker tape parade occurred in 1886!
I briefly used a teletype writer with punched tape writer/reader in the mid-1970s when I worked as an AV tech at a community college that had a classroom/auditorium with interactive voting stations at each seat. The teacher/speaker could ask the students/audience members multiple choice questions, and they’d turn a knob to one of five positions and push a button. Some device in the back room would record the responses onto the teletypewriter and punched tape. But there was no built-in way to analyze the results, so after the class I’d transmit the tape, via a telephone and an acoustic coupler, to a remote computer that would send the speaker a printed analysis of the results a day or two later. It seems so Stone Age now.
I sent one telegram in my life and it was in 1996 or so. Another benefit of one is that you could ask that they be delivered at a specific place and time in the future. I was going to be in Malaysia at the time of a good friend’s wedding. Two weeks before the wedding I set up a telegram to be sent to them during the reception. For whatever reason they still charged by the word and it cost me like $100.
I was born at the end of 1963. My mom still has a shoebox full of the congratulations that people sent her. Most of them were greeting cards but there were a few old school telegrams presumably sent to the hospital.
When I started with my current employer in the summer of '81, our offices were nice with lots of new equipment, but no fax yet. We had telex. As I remember, telex sometimes went by shortwave radio links. Soon there was a fax machine, too, but it took a little while for telex to die out. Of course, as long as not everybody had fax, and there was no email, you had to keep a telex running to be able to communicate by text in minutes rather than days.