[GreenKeys] early automatic Morse to Baudot equipment?

[Jim Cooper]

On 5 Sep 2019 at 13:03, Nick England wrote:

> Has anyone seen a photo or info on
> an early 1950's automatic device that
> would transcribe Morse or other code
> that was inked onto paper tape? I have
> heard of later Morse to Baudot
> converters but nothing this early and
> involving code inked onto paper
> tape. 

One of my fond memories is of the day, 
while working for Mackay Radio / ITT World Comm 
in NYC, that I went up to the cable room where 
the undersea cable from NYC to Havana was working -- 
only a few weeks before that circuit went QRT. 

They had ink recorders (Wheatstone, I believe) running 
there at about 100 wpm inking the 1s and 0s of the 
morse on narrow paper tape ... 'flying' through the 
recorder and being rolled up on a tape winder for later 
manual transcription.  

The ink recorder was a very large (maybe 8 or 9 inch 
diameter circular, and 6 inches deep) magnetic coil 
which operated a very frail tiny ink tube to the ink 
nozzle that wrote on the tape. 

I wish I had gone up there a few more times, but 
it was out of my department and I was a shy young 
adult at the time !!  (working in the M-28 point-to-point 
switching design department). 

I may have one of those ink recorders in the back 
recesses of my garage (haven't been back there for 
35 years) ... possibly also one for parts. 

The other side of the Havana circuit was equipped 
with Wheatstone perforators (which punched TWO 
holes in the tape, along with a tiny center hole - the 
location of the holes on the tape determined when 
key-down and key-up occurred) along with the 2-hole 
tape keyer that read the tape and keyed the cable 
circuit. 

Such fond memories, after 55 years!!  The brain is 
a remarkable gadget.   ;)) 

Jim   w2jc   (formerly W2BVE)