[GreenKeys] Well, it's not a Teletype

[John Nagle]

> The insides look like a variable speed disk drive. I think a recorder
> would be steady speed but a reader or tape puller would be variable.
> It appears to have connections for something on the back with nice
> big RF chokes in the line. Except for the contacts it looks like the
> puller for a morse ink set up.

    It's clearly a mechanical wheel-and-disc variable speed drive that
drives perforated tape of some kind.  We can't see what the
mechanism under the tape head is, though.  The speed dial has
markings from 10 to 200.

    The manufacturer is "RFL Industries" (previously Radio Frequency
Labs, later Dowty RFL Industries) of Boonton, New Jersey, founded
by Richard W. Seabury in the 1920s.  They built various kinds of
instrumentation and magnetics gear into at least the 1990s.

    It might be a degausser for magnetic-stripe film.  At one time,
it was common to use sprocket-driven fully magnetically coated
film for audio recording in film production.  The audio gear
was independent of the photographic gear, but both were
sprocketed and they were locked together electrically.

See

http://www.folkstreams.net/vafp/clip.php?id=52

for what a reel of 16mm full-coat looked like.

    But the transport looks like it would be too harsh on a
magnetic material, and is too narrow for 16mm.

				John Nagle