[GreenKeys] Mites: TGC-14 vs. TT-299, what difference?

[jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu]

Well, now, Teleprinter Corp. was the original name of the company that was
later named MITE Corp.  I don't know if that's the same outfit that used
to sell 14s; they might have changed their name to avoid that confusion.

The machine was described in AIEE Transactions on Communication and
Electronics, July 1958, and in Western Union Technical Review in April
1958.  At that time the name of the company was Teleprinter Corp. and
MITE was an acronym for Miniaturized Integrated Tele<something> Equipment.
Western Union invested some money in the company.  The author of the
articles was Bernard Howard; and it is he who received all the patents
on the machine.  The first if these was 2,679,029 filed in 1954 and
issued in 1956, so that tells us when the R&D was going on.  Somehow
I found that Teleprinter Corp. became Mite Corp. in 1961.  Sometime after
that various people started getting patents assigned to Mite Corp. for
inventions related to sewing machines.

The bio of Bernard Howard in WUTR says he was Vice President for 
Engineering of the Teleprinter Corporation, attended the U of Idaho and
New Mexico School of Mines. He spent 15 years doing engineering design
in the fields of aerial nagivation, communication and wire recording, for
such corporations as Bendix Aviation, Federal Telecommunications 
Laboratories, Fada Radio and Electric, and Air Associates.  And that he
holds many patents in addition to those assigned to Teleprinter Corp.

So it seems he had no background in the teleprinter business, for whatever
that's worth.  The last patent I found for him was issued in 1967 (but
maybe I quit looking at that point).  In addition to the machine we are
familiar with they made, or at least got a patent on, a tape strip printer
that fits into an aircraft instrument mounting hole.

On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Jack wrote:

> Some of the MITE's were "made" by a company in Paramus, NJ, called
> Teleprinter Corp. That's the same outfit that used to sell 14's and so on
> to us young kids in the 1960's. Not sure how they managed to get
> their names on the MITE ID tag, but there it is. I also think this is the
> same outfit that got nailed by the Gov't. for stripping old TTY's, cleaning
> the parts, putting them in new envelopes and selling the parts to the US
> Gov't. as
> "new" parts.
>