[GreenKeys] Question regarding TWX and Dial TWX...

[Jim Haynes]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010, Larry Tighe wrote:

> Hey Don! !
>
> Isn't there a "story" somewhere in that history that  a court required Bell
> System to give up tty service to W.U.?  or maybe visa versa?
>
> lar

This is a long, long story.

Way back, after the Bell patent fight, W.U. agreed to stay out of the
telephone business and AT&T agreed to stay out of the telegraph
business.  I think it was Pac Bell at the time that was taking
telegrams from the public, just as W.U. did.

AT&T continued to supply circuits for private line telegraphy, as
they could be derived from telephone circuits by means of composite
sets.  A composite set is a set of low and high pass filters that
separate voice and telegraph signals by virtue of the low frequency
of the latter.  AT&T also set up some private-line TTY switching
systems, typically for police use, before TWX.

When AT&T introduced TWX it became an article of faith with W.U.
people that AT&T was violating the agreement to stay out of the
telegraph business.  Obviously AT&T did not think so; they were
providing an entirely different kind of service from the store-and
forward service to the general public that W.U. provided.  But
W.U. (and Postal Telegraph) complained that TWX was "cream-skimming",
that businesses large enough to use TWX would use it instead of
sending telegrams through the telegraph companies or leasing private
wire systems from them, leaving the telegraph companies to handle
the less-profitable traffic from smaller volume users.

I have some documents from the mid-1950s where W.U. was posturing to
the FCC that there should be one voice carrier and one "record"
carrier for the U.S., meaning they should have all the telegraph
business.  As if the wires could tell what kind of traffic was
passing over them.  And AT&T said they were not interested in selling
TWX to WU and pointed out all the difficulties of separating TWX
from the phone system of the day, such as all the equipment located
in racks in telephone offices that would have to bd moved.

Eventually W.U. brought Telex to the U.S., first in some big cities
and then spreading it around.  I have always thought this was a mistake,
since it put them into head-to-head competition with AT&T and AT&T
owned all the local loops that W.U. needed to connect to their customers.
But I've been told that Telex was quite profitable for W.U.

W.U. kept yammering about the unfair competition from AT&T and that
there should be one record carrier and eventually AT&T gave in and
agreed to sell TWX to W.U.  I don't know whether either company
realized at the time that the best days of TWX were already past;
the growth was in services like Data Phone that would transmit data
over the AT&T network from telephones.