[GreenKeys] A Little More TWX History

[Richard Knoppow]

    The Hogan who was active with the IRE was probably John 
V.L.Hogan, who was a radio pioneer and at one time owned station 
WQXR in New York. This was an experiment in high-fidelity AM. 
Originally W2XR, it became commercial adopting a Q in place of 
the 2 since they look much alike. The station was New York's 
classical music station for decades.  J.V.L. Hogan was also an 
early experimenter with television, FM, and FAX via radio.
There is a decent bio on Wikepedia at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Lawless_Hogan

   Also, I wonder how they spelled catacol. Catachol is another 
name for a type of photographic developer.
On 11/27/2019 7:02 AM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
>>
>> I used to do contract work for Alden (I think that's the 
>> company name) in
>> MA. They made wet paper fax machines for distributing weather 
>> maps to the
>> FAA Flight Service Stations. This was linear FM over a phone 
>> line. A
>> rotating drum with a helix on it provided horizontal scan while 
>> the paper
>> was pulled up by another motor. The helix would pass current 
>> through the
>> paper to turn it brown.
> 
> When I was working for Teletype we were tasked by AT&T to produce 
> some
> fax machines for a Long Lines government project.  I wasn't on 
> the trip,
> but some guys went to visit Alden and I think maybe we bought one 
> of their
> machines to try out.  They told how John Alden was very proud of 
> his heritage, being a descendant of the John Alden of Mayflower 
> fame.  But we
> decided their machine was not rugged enough to satisfy the customer.
> 
> The other company in the business at that time was Hogan, located 
> in New
> York.  Mr. Hogan was the son of a Hogan who was very prominent in 
> the early days of the I.R.E.  He used a similar wet paper process 
> except his
> was called catecohl and made gray marks instead of sepia.  Alden 
> kept
> saying their sepia process was safer chemically and was easier to 
> read
> than gray.
> 
> We didn't consider Western Union because they were committed to 
> Teledeltos
> paper and we were concerned about the fumes and such from that 
> material.
> 
> So in the end we contracted with one of our suppliers, Dixon 
> Automatic Tool of Rockford IL to build the fax machines.  The 
> customer wanted both
> a large-format machine for map-like material and a small format 
> photo
> quality machine.  Dixon made the large machine and I don't know 
> whatever
> was done about the small machine.
> 
> Around the same time, mid 1960s, Stewart-Warner was making a 
> letter-size
> wet paper fax machine.  Their intention was to compete with 
> Western Union
> by offering fax over the telephone dial network, using AT&T modems.
> They imagined having agencies all over the country that could 
> send and
> receive fax messages for walk-in customers.  I guess nothing ever 
> came of
> it.
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-- 
Richard Knoppow
1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
WB6KBL