[GreenKeys] Why J bell for W.U. and S bell for everybody else

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

Another of the ancient historical articles explains why all the
Western Union machines have bell on FIGS J and all the Bell and
other machines have bell on FIGS S.

It seems they all originally had bell on FIGS J.  Then one of the
Bell System first customers was Associated Press, and they wanted
two bell signals.  One the ordinary one-ding J bell, and the other
to be a contact that would ring a remote electric bell that would
keep on ringing until someone reset it.  They wanted that to be
sure the news editor saw important bulletins.  So AT&T put the
bell operating contact on FIGS S in place of apostrophe.  Then
on the printer typewheel they ground off half of the double quote
mark on Z to make a single quote to be used for apostrophe.  If
you needed a double quote you would use FIGS Z twice.

Then after a while the Associated Press decided they didn't really
need two separate bell signals so long as they had a choice of a ding
bell or a continuous electric bell.  So AT&T kept the bell contact
they had already designed for FIGS S and arranged so it could optionally
be a ding bell instead of a contact.  That left FIGS J free of the bell
operation, so they put back the apostrophe and restored the double quote
mark on FIGS Z.

Unshift on space also came out of the Associated Press job - they found
they could save a lot of keystrokes if the machine would return to LTRS
case after typing periods and commas and such.  Plus it was helpful
if the printer accidentally got into FIGS case when receiving LTRS
case text.




jhhaynes at earthlink dot net