[GreenKeys] Hellschreiber

[Duncan Brown]

Not that far off-topic - Edmund Kleinschmidt designed a Hellscriber 
device for Teletype Corp. in 1925-1930 and filed a patent on it in 
August 1930 (Dr. Hell had filed a patent over a year earlier). It was 
known as a "Radio Printer" because it was a much more robust system than 
RTTY at the time.  (The AWA Museum has a prototype of the Radio Printer 
that came from the Teletype Museum.)

When AT&T bought Teletype Corp. in 1930, work on the Radio Printer was 
stopped, because AT&T was mainly interested in the TWX system. But in 
the late 1930s, strange radio signals where received from Germany and 
apparently the US government asked Teletype Corp. if they could build 
something to receive the German Hellschriber signals.  Teletype Corp. 
pulled out Kleinschmidt's old design and released the M17 about 1939.

I don't know if Teletype Corp ever sold the M17 commercially, but there 
was talk of using them as radio printers in police cars.  The printer is 
very simple and was essentially the first dot-matrix printer. The 
keyboard/encoder was much more complicated.  Teletype Corp. simplified 
things somewhat by designing a 5-bit to Hellschriber converter.  To send 
a message, you punched it out on tape (on a GPE) and then fed the tape 
into the converter.

And there is your history lesson for the night!

Have Fun,

Duncan
K2OEQ


On 03-Nov-15 21:29, Steve wrote:
> Gents,
> A bit off topic but in the same catagory as TTY. Check out this site;
> http://www.nonstopsystems.com/radio/hellschreiber-function-operation.htm
> The animations are very well done. Remember reading an article in either
> QST or Ham Radio about this unusual communications device long ago and 
> never
> quite forgot about it. Recently I found an old Japanese version of one 
> of these machines
> (receiver) along with the original electronics to drive it. Note the 
> advantage
> the Hellschreiber has over traditional TTY (sending graphical characters).
> Pretty cool IMO! And dead nuts simple to boot.
> There are software programs that are capable of running this mode if 
> anyone
> is interested.
> Steve W6SSP
>


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