[GreenKeys] Western Union manuals for a 2-B aka 14

[Jim Haynes]

>   OK you said..."I never understood why Western Union used gummed tape
> rather than using page printers and printing telegrams on that" -----
>  
Several reasons.

1) Model 14 is substantially cheaper than a page printer
2) With gummed tape you can stick the message onto a company telegram
    pre-printed form, with all the terms and conditions, etc.  With page
    printing the technology was not there yet to have forms and form
    feedout and all that so you could have each telegram start on a fresh
    form.
2A) Which makes it easy to insert special forms for birthday greetings,
    birth announcements, holiday greetings, any kind of message where you
    would like to have a special form.
3) The big one, I think, is that with gummed tape if the sending operator
    makes a mistake, they just type XXXXXX and the receiving operator
    cuts off or pastes over the error.  With page printers you would have
    to retype the whole message to get it clean, or come up with some
    convention understood by the customer for handling corrections.  And
    you don't really want the customer to see the mistakes the operators
    put in.
4) A very minor one is that you don't get to the right margin of the paper
    and have to hyphenate.  The gumming operator can see if the next word
is going to fit on the form before commiting to paste it down.

The customers who had printers on their premises did tend to prefer page
machines.  That caused W.U. to develop the 100-series machines which were
cheaper than Teletype Model 15s but considerably less rugged.  And W.U.
had to develop tape-to-page converters if they wanted to avoid 
re-keyboarding messages between the two kinds of machines.  See W.U.
Technical Review online.