[GreenKeys] The Teletype Machine That Could Draw

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: Chuck Rehor -- Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2026 5:52 PM
> Can we get the two JPG's as text files so we can send to our TTY's?

I wonder if any of today's generally good OCR tools could successfully don this conversion.  I suspect that it would be faster to try hand transcription, as awful as that job sounds.  Someone did it 50 years ago to make the originals.

When I saw the title, however, my mind flashed back not to ASCII (or BAUDOT) art, but to the fax machine I remember seeing as a child when I visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.  They had two machines next to each other in what I recall looked like identical housings.  I'm pretty sure one was a Model 32 RO machine printing wire service text.  The other was a fax receiver printing weather maps.  Looking through the window on top, you could see a helical bar that was turning one turn per scan line behind the page while the paper advanced one scan line per turn of the helix.  The cloth ribbon ran full width between the page and bar that hammered the ribbon against the page and helix for each black pixel.

I stared at that machine for several minutes trying to figure out how it works.  The above description is from my memory so may be wrong.

In any case, that was definitely a TTY that could draw!

            Doug Jones