[GreenKeys] Teletype colors...
Jim Haynes
jhhaynes at earthlink.net
Mon Jul 25 23:01:08 EDT 2022
>From your earlier pictures I was guessing that the blue paint is an
amateur repaint job. And the reason is that the rubber feet that were
shown sitting on the table and were also painted blue. I don't think
Teletype would ever have done that - they painted the metal and then
put the reddish rubber feet on the legs. But of course I haven't looked
at the actual item to see if there are signs of amateurish painting.
Now there's your picture that shows the four rotary switches on a little
panel. That's surely amateur because I don't think any professional would
mark a switch "TEE DEE". It looks like there are probably two loops,
maybe a local loop just for running the machine and another one that is
either used with the signal line or is a second local loop. So the
operator can choose with the switches which element of the system is
in which loop. That's what I would guess the 1 and 2 are about.
I see the power supply has a Western Electric name plate but it was made
by Power Equipment Co. of Galion, OH. That company made a lot of power
supplies for Teletype, but most of them didn't have Western Electric
name plates. And they tended to have constant voltage transformers.
That was something Power Equipment Co. specialized in. Later Power
Equipment was acquired by North Electric. One Model 19 power supply
that passed through my hands did not use a constant voltage transformer
but rather a magnetic amplifier type of voltage regulator. Used two
VR tubes as the voltage reference. Constant voltage transformers are
frequency sensitive, so the military couldn't use them, what with field
generators not being very accurate in frequency. There's a military
power supply for M19 that uses thyratron rectifier tubes. And brown
wrinkle paint was very normal for the Power Equipment Co. power supplies,
regardless of the color of the table and machine they were used in.
I've also seen a Model 19 on a Western Union table where the power supply
was supplied by W.U. Don't remember now if it uses a CVT or a plain
transformer. I guess W.U. with their penny-pinching felt they could
save money by furnishing their own power supplies.
By the way, Teletype designed the AN/FGC-5 time division multiplex
system but had Power Equipment Co. manufacture them.
---
"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
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