[Qcwa] Memory Lane !!

[Bob Wilder]

While in Europe at Chateauroux AFSta in the early 1960's our squadron 
was responsible for the maintenance and installation of HelFax machines 
in the control tower, weather station and a
couple of other sites on base.  This machine used a stylus that you used 
to write on a paper\
sheet and it was transmitted to all of the rest of the stations. 
 Normally used to update weather
information from the weather station to the tower and the operations 
section of the flying
outfits on base.  Beauty was you had a hard copy of everything that was 
sent and received.

Bob, AF2HD
USAF(Ret)

FrankWeiss@aol.com wrote:

>
>Thanks very much to Harvey Chase W4TG for the history of Morse Code and 
>Morse's contribution to the telegraph industry.  This brought back memories 
>of my days with Xerox Corp. in the mid to late 1960s when I was writing 
>patent applications on the 'new' technology of facsimile transmission.  It 
>was new in the 60s for fax transmission over telephone lines, but fax 
>antedates the telephone!  Everyone nowadays thinks that fax and phone lines 
>are intermarried, but phone lines just happen to be the economical and 
>widespread medium on which fax transmissions are made today.
>
>While heavily involved in Xerox's Telecopier� facsimile program for seven 
>years, I wanted to get as much background prior art that I could so as to 
>build our knowledge of this burgeoning field.  Everyone on this reflector 
>remembers wire photos, and RCA and Western Electric had that industry tied 
>u[p for years in the 1930s and 40s.  But facsimile transmission owes its 
>beginning to telegraph lines.  If memory serves me right, a curved platen was 
>used together with a pendulum stylus to scan a document.  If the pendulum comp
>letes a circuit at the transmitting end, and a like pendulum at the receiving 
>end uses the interrupted D.C. current on the line to burn a similar pattern 
>on a document at the receiving end, then a 'facsimile'' of the transmitted 
>document appears on the received document which 'resembles' the transmitted 
>document.  Very crude, but a fax nevertheless.  I remember at least two 
>systems used in the late 1840s (no I was not an eyeball observer!).  One used 
>a damp chemically coated document at the sending end with raised letters, 
>which closed a circuit while the pendulum (in a raster scan, either move the 
>pendulum or move the document) scanned the document.  A similar chemically 
>coated document was used at the receiving end, which changed color slightly 
>when current flowed through it in sync with the sending pendulum.  The second 
>technique used a thin metal document with open spaces cut into the metal 
>sheet in the form of information to be sent (think of a big X cut out of the 
>middle of the thin sheet).  When the scanning pendulum was in contact with 
>the metal, a circuit was closed and the information sent to the receiving end 
>where either a similar thin metal sheet had holes burned into it in the form 
>of the information cut into the sending sheet.  Or the same chemically coated 
>paper document could be used to chemically change color when current flowed 
>through it.
>
>All this back in the 1840s!
>
>Sorry to bore you if you got this far, but it was a good memory lane trip for 
>me!
>
>73
>
>Frank K6FCW
>
>
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