[GreenKeys] Seattle Western Union History

[Richard Schumann]

Thanks Jim and Doug for filling in some of the gaps!

Richard kn7sfz


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Haynes" <jhhaynes at earthlink.net>
To: "Richard Schumann" <richardschumann at comcast.net>
Cc: <Til128 at aol.com>; <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2008 7:02 PM
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] Seattle Western Union History


>
> On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Richard Schumann wrote:
>
>> Anybody know the circumstances under which American Morse was phased out 
>> for the Morse we are familiar with today, and how Teletype figured in to 
>> all this?  Maybe some kind of website with a timeline showing how the 
>> different methods overlapped?  There must have been some real conflicts 
>> among those who resisted change.
>>
> I don't have a timeline for you, but here is how it went, as I understand
> it.
>
> The original Morse code, which we call American Morse, was actually
> developed by Morse's collaborator Alfred Vail.  It was used pretty
> much unchanged from the early days of the telegraph through the very
> end of land-line telegraphy in the U.S.  The very end was more or
> less in the railroad business.  Western Union switched to teleprinters
> early, because telegraphy was the backbone of their business and
> teleprinters were faster than manual Morse and took less training
> to use.  Of course there were some old W.U. people who knew Morse
> long after teleprinters came into use, and they continued to use Morse
> occasionally, for things like wire maintenance and for communication
> with railroads.  The railroads hung onto manual Morse for a lot of
> their operations because transmitting messages was not the backbone
> of their business, but merely a tool of it.  They didn't have enough
> traffic to need the speed of teleprinters, and they didn't want to
> spend money on teleprinters and their maintenance when Morse equipment
> was cheap and simple and worked well enough.  (Though for some parts
> of their operation the railroads did make good use of teleprinters;
> but out along the line there was a lot of Morse used until about
> 1968.  And the manual Morse was replaced not by teleprinters but
> by telephones, and now by radio.)
>
> The Morse code that we know from ham radio was called Continental
> Morse, meaning the Continent of Europe.  So presumably the Europeans
> in adapting telegraphy to their needs decided that the code should
> be changed somewhat - and probably they added characters to the code
> for things that are in some languages but not in English.  I suspect
> the French would do that sort of thing - they always wanted to do
> things their own way anyway.
>
> Then when radio came into the picture there was some use of American
> Morse by U.S. stations, but there was a need to have a common code
> for all the ships at sea regardless of their nationality, so the
> Continental code was adopted and called the International Morse code.
> Around the same time the Q signals were developed both for brevity
> and to have a language-independent system of communication.  That is,
> U.S. and French and German wireless operators, for example, didn't have
> to know one another's languages because just about everything they
> needed to say could be expressed in Q signals.
>
> So the American Morse was not phased out so much as it went its own
> way with the wire lines and clicking sounders, while the International
> Morse code came into use for radio.
>
>
>