Why did telegraph messages SOUND WEIRD STOP?

[abel29a]

Ah, makes sense.

[Lukeinva]

My guess is, it is only in the last 10 to 15 years that typing in all caps is considered shouting.

[Quercus]

@johnpost

not only might a period be incorrectly interpreted in the transcribed telegram but the number of morse code elements to send STOP is only double that of a period.

And, since they had so much practice at it, I bet most operators could send “STOP” in about the same amount of time as a period.

[CookingWithGas]

IIRC a musician (I’m thinking Mason Williams) wrote a little book that included a “telegram poem” with lines like:

I FIRST MET YOU AT A BUS STOP
AND THE SIGHT OF YOU MADE MY HEART STOP

Can’t find a cite, saw the book maybe 30 years ago.

[Bear_Nenno]

@Jas09

Here’s a booklet from 1928 on “How to write telegrams properly” - it has some interesting information. The Telegraph Office -- A Tribute to Morse Telegraphy and Resource for Wire and Wireless Telegraph Historians and Collectors

Pretty decent answer in that link:

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.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

Most telegraph messages (after the very early years) were transmitted using the Baudot code (or in America, the Murray variation of it). Those are 5 bit codes, so a maximum of 32 characters. The alphabet takes 26 (upper case only, no room for lower case), 1 for a space, leaving 5 characters remaining. Not enough room for a full set of punctuation characters, those were used for control characters. There wasn’t even room for the 10 digits, those had to be sent with an extra figure shift before them.

So you couldn’t use lower case or periods in a telegraph message – there was no such character to send.

[Sinisterniik]

@Jas09

Here’s a booklet from 1928 on “How to write telegrams properly” - it has some interesting information. The Telegraph Office -- A Tribute to Morse Telegraphy and Resource for Wire and Wireless Telegraph Historians and Collectors

I found this interesting:

If you are telegraphing a person or firm you are positive is well known nationally or locally, a brief address is sufficient. If you have occasion, for example, to telegraph the President ,of the United States, a message addressed to:

The President, White House, Washington, D. C.

will reach the Chief Executive if filed at any telegraph office in the world. To write it:

His, Excellency, The President of the United States, The White House, Washington, D. C.

Is to be needlessly verbose. A telegram to a Member of Congress addressed:

Hon. John Doe, Member Congress, Washington, D. C.

will reach the addressee as surely and speedily as a message addressed to:

Hon. John Doe, Member of Congress from the State of Blank, Room 346 House Office Building, Washington, D. C.

Is this still true with USPS? Can I address a letter to my Congressman in Washington and get it sent there without a street address?

Also, I’m going to start giving out my address as “His, Excellency,…”

[pulykamell]

@Leo_Bloom

I don’t know if this is done now, what with email and all, but news stories were closed by a bunch of dashes and the numeral “30” and some more dashes.

I don’t know, either, but in J-school in the mid-90s, we were still typing (or writing) “-more-” at the bottom of pages that continued to the next and “-30-” for the last page of news stories we’d hand in for assignments.

[Mk_VII]

Journalists used to use cablese to reduce the number of words in an international cable; this [probably apocryphal] exchange supposedly passed between the London Daily Telegraph’s office and their man in the Congo:-

WHY UNNEWS QUERY

• UNNEWS HERE STOP

• UNNEWS THERE UNJOB HERE STOP

• UPSTICKJOB ARSEWARDS STOP RUDE LETTER FOLLOWS STOP

Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop famously contains several examples

UNPROCEED LAKUWARD STOP … REMAIN CONTACTING CUMREDS STOP NEWS EXYOU UNRECEIVED STOP DAILY HARD NEWS ESSENTIALIST STOP…

[wolfman]

@abel29a

If they charged by the word (as appear to be the case), wouldn’t people strive to find the longest words possible in their Thesarus? (At least, I know I would) Why not type a whole sentence as one word for that matter, and let the recipient do the decoding? Or maybe this was frowned upon

I always wondered if it worked the same way in German. It seems like You can put a whole sentence into a compound noun in German if you try hard enough.

[Mk_VII]

There was a maximum number of characters in a word.

[whitetho]

@abel29a

If they charged by the word (as appear to be the case), wouldn’t people strive to find the longest words possible in their Thesarus? (At least, I know I would) Why not type a whole sentence as one word for that matter, and let the recipient do the decoding? Or maybe this was frowned upon

@wolfman

I always wondered if it worked the same way in German. It seems like You can put a whole sentence into a compound noun in German if you try hard enough.

There were all sorts of rules and sub-rules to keep things from getting out of hand. Some examples:

@The Telegraph Instructor

Plain language messages (i. e., neither Code nor Cipher) may be written in any language that can be expressed in Roman letters. In such messages each word of fifteen letters or less is counted as a word, and words of over fifteen letters are counted at the rate of fifteen letters or fractions of fifteen letters to a word,

Code messages may contain words belonging to one or more of the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Latin. The use of words of other languages is not allowed. Code messages may also contain artificial words-that is, groups of letters so combined as to be pronounceable in at least one of the eight admitted languages. In code messages each code word (whether genuine or artificial) of ten letters or less is counted as a word, and no code word of more than ten letters can be accepted. If any words in plain language, and of more than ten letters each, are used in code messages, they should be counted at the rate of ten letters or fraction of ten letters to a word.

In cipher messages, which may be composed of groups of figures or of groups of letters, the groups are counted at the rate of five figures or letters, or fraction thereof, to a word. Words in plain language inserted in such messages are counted as instructed in plain language messages.

COUNTING OF WORDS, ETC.

When the letters “ch” come together in the spelling of a dictionary word, they are counted as one letter. In artificial words the combination is counted as two letters.

Inverted commas, the two signs of the parenthesis and each separate figure, letter, underline or character will be counted as one word.

Signs of punctuation, hyphens and apostrophes are not counted or sent except upon formal demand of the sender, in which case they will be charged for as one word each.

Groups of figures will be counted and charged for at the rate of five figures, or fraction thereof, as one word. Decimal points and commas, used in the formation of numbers, also bars of division and letters added to figures to form ordinal numbers, are to be counted as figures and charged for at the rate of five figures or fraction thereof, as one word.

Words joined by a hyphen or separated by an apostrophe are counted as so many separate words.

Abbreviated and misspelled words and illegitimate compound words and words combined in a manner contrary to the usages of any of the languages authorized, are inadmissible.

[clairobscur]

@Jas09

Here’s a booklet from 1928 on “How to write telegrams properly” - it has some interesting information. The Telegraph Office -- A Tribute to Morse Telegraphy and Resource for Wire and Wireless Telegraph Historians and Collectors

Interesting reading.