[GreenKeys] Teletypes in police stations... anyone done a definitive stud...

[Jim Haynes]

There is a long history of teletypewriter use by police organizations.
Recently photos of TTY equipment in old police operations have been 
offered on ebay.com  One mention of police service in the Eastern U.S.
is given in a paper "Modern Practices in Private Wire Telegraph Service"
by R. E. Pierce of AT&T, AIEE Transactions, June 1931, p. 426.

Circa 1960 Teletype had a switching system called TASP that I was told
was marketed primarily to police departments.  Some patents describing
this system are 2,625,601 (1953) and 3,251,929 (1966).  It's curious that
Teletype offered such a system, since switching arrangements were usually
considered to be on Bell Labs' turf.  (Or Western Union, for non-Bell
users)  Teletype was allowed to do switching work for customers where
it was felt there was no general Bell System market.  Therefore I assume
TASP was marketed to police (and other agencies) that wanted ownership
of the equipment rather than a leased service.

When amateur RTTY first got started in the late 1940s the majority of
Teletype machines available to amateurs were Model 12 page printers,
and most of them seemed to come out of New York.  I remember reading
somewhere that most of them had come out of the New York police 
department.  The NYPD had replaced its tty machines out of necessity
when Teletype quit making maintenance parts for them.




jhhaynes at earthlink dot net