[GreenKeys] Western Union

[Jim Haynes]

The machine is a Teletype Model 31.  Teletype manuals are 200B and 1140B,
available on the www.navy-radio.com web site.

This particular version was used by Western Union for mainly for reporting
sports events, and other news events requiring a portable setup.  In 
earlier times W.U. sent Morse operators to cover the events, but with
the decline of Morse they switched to teleprinters.  I've seen a few
different designs of cases - yours has the flat front case; another design
is shaped like a boot, with the keyboard in the toe.

Oh, this is interesting.  I have several pictures of a W.U. Model 31 in
my Teletype Scrapbook, and it must be the same machine you have, as it
has the paint chip on the keyboard exactly like the one in your pictures.
I don't know where I got these pictures.

Later, when W.U. disposed of a lot of its older equipment, some of these
were obtained by deaf people for portable use as teleprinters, back before
there were the custom-made modern TDD terminals.  There's a story of one
deaf man, Andy Saks of San Francisco, who had his Model 31 stolen and was
able to recover it by paying a ransom to the thief.

Another version of Model 31 was for use in airplanes.  It operated on 
26VDC, and used a vacuum tube to control the speed of the governed motor,
to eliminate RF noise caused by the governor.

And of course there are all kinds of rumors of government use by spies
and such.

The problem for us today is inability to get the necessary printer
tape, gummed or ungummed.  And, by the way, non-WU Model 14 printers
use 3/8" tape, while W.U. printers use 5/16" tape.  Some employee won
a big suggestion award for shaving that 1/16" off the width of tape they
were using.  To a penny-pinching company like W.U. that was worth a lot
of money.  I don't know about the non-WU Model 31 machines.

I'd say those are pretty rare machines today, certainly a lot more rare
than 15s and 28s.

Jim W6JVE

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man