[GreenKeys] Western union telegram printer

Jim Haynes jhhaynes at earthlink.net
Mon Oct 2 22:37:57 EDT 2023


Also the gummed-tape printers allowed pasting the telegrams on to
printed forms containing all the fine print about the service and
the company.  Whereas with page printers it would be necessary
either to have a form-feed mechanism to begin each message on the
proper spot on the preprinted forms, or to not use the forms.
Instead there was page print paper with the W.U. logo printed along
one edge.

If you look at the Western Union Technical Review (online) you can
read about page-to-tape and tape-to-page converter circuits to be
used when one kind of machine had to talk to the other kind.

One big advantage of page machines is when the copy is lenghty, such as
wire service news.  There it would be a lot of work to gum down all the
tape when there were thousands of words per day.  Another advantage of
page machines is when the customer wants to receive on multiple copy
forms.  In the days before good and inexpensive copy machines it was
a real pain if the customer needed multiple copies.

I don't know authoritatively about the Teletype Corp. equipment codes,
but it's been suggested that the Model 14 line began with F for 
"fourteen".  thus the typing unit is FP, the typing reperforator is
FPR, and on to that wonderful machine the FRXD.  The tape transmitter
distributor was simply XD though considered part of the Model 14 product
line.  I guess that's because XD could be used with the GPE perforator
to make a sending station that had nothing to do with Model 14.  GPE
is allegedly "green code perforator" where "green" code was the version
of Baudot used by Western Union which had green as a corporate color.
There was a "blue code" machine for Postal Teleegraph whose corporate
color was blue.  I've heard that blue code was upper/lower case.

 	---

 	"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


More information about the GreenKeys mailing list