[GreenKeys] Western Union Desk Fax Machines

[Geoff Fors]

W-U seems to have cleaned out a warehouse of those fax machines in 
California about 1970-71 as someone offered a truckload of them to hams at 
something like $ 10 each via notices to radio clubs.  I traveled to San Jose 
to get one, where there was a fellow with a U-Haul truck unloading them in a 
parking lot, and a line of hams carrying them off.

There were two varieties of machine, Deskfax and Telefax.  Most were 
Deskfax.  The Telefax made a positive image while the Deskfax a negative, at 
least as we were able to configure them over radio.  The mod involved adding 
a toggle switch and some wiring.  There was a messy red ink roller which 
marked outgoing telegrams to indicate they had been sent, which was one of 
the things you removed when you installed the mod.  I recall a rather 
extensive modification and construction article about these units in a 
contemporary ARRL or E&E radio amateur's handbook.  We used them on 440 MHz 
although the mods I made didn't allow the pages to synch up and the images 
would usually be split somewhere.

Under certain circumstances you could get a shock from the high voltage 
printing stylus, since the back of the paper was metalized.  The stylus was 
a thin piece of wire like a bristle from a wire brush.  The machines gave 
out some smoke and a stink when "printing" a page.

There was a Hepburn-Tracy movie in the early 1950's which shows one of these 
sitting on a desk in an office.

Most of the these got junked out years ago when the fascination subsided. 
There must be some still lying around in attics and garages though.

Geoff
WB6NVH