[GreenKeys] A Little More TWX History

[Russ Miller]

As I recall, Western Union was making $400M / year in the 1970’s with a profit of ~ 60% - enough to pay for the Siemens and ITT Milan Telex Central Office equipment that was amortized over 20 years.

Telex rates were originally distance sensitive but the the mid to late 1970s, the rate structure was postalized. Reprogramming the rate change in all of the exchanges was a PITA. I recall that the new rate was 9 pulses per minute.  A Telex call from New York City to Los Angeles CA went from 24 PPM to 9 PPM, a potentially great savings.

But, the introduction of the FAX machine, with an ability to share graphs and drawings without the monthly rental of an access line from MA BELL as well as the monthly rental of a Teletype Model 32ASR was the deathknell for Telex worldwide.  

73
Russ WA3FRP 
Former Telex Exchange Resident Engineer; Manager, Circuit Switching Systems; District Manager 1969 - 1985 

As you note, each Telex customer had a billing pulse counter. They were read monthly.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 26, 2019, at 5:43 PM, Jim Haynes <jhhaynes at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>> 
>> While looking for something else, I, of course, ran across this, which I
>> thought would be interesting to the group.
>> 
>> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 14:26:39 -0800
>> From: haynes at cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes)
>> Subject: A Little More TWX History
>> [W.U. introduced Telex to the U.S. which was]
>> probably a bad mistake for them. [reasons listed]
>> 
> I have since been informed that W.U. actually made quite a bit of money
> in Telex.  Maybe this was because Telex was international while TWX
> was US only.  Or maybe their rates were more attractive - my source
> didn't say.
> 
> Why was Telex a dial-up system from the get-go while TWX used manual
> switchboards for such a long time?  I believe the reason has to do with
> customer billing arrangements.
> 
> In long-distance telephony in the U.S., and also in TWX, customers
> expected to get a bill telling where they had called and how many
> minutes they were being charged for.  It was a manual operation for
> switchboard operators to fill out paper toll tickets and time stamp
> them.  Then the accounting department had to sort out the tickets by
> customer and calculate the charges for each call.
> 
> The practice in Europe (maybe for telephone service also? and certainly
> in Telex) did not involve recording the place called and the number of
> minutes.  Rather, when a call was put through there was also a connection
> to a pulse generator, with the number of pulses per minute related to
> the distance between calling and called numbers.  So the customer paid
> by the pulse, not by the minute.  And this was easy to automate, just
> have a pulse counter connected with each station that could place calls.
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