Data communications over telegraph circuits 1891

Jim Haynes

Thanks for the information.

Would you know how the Desk-Fax worked? That is, was the fax image converted to their standard Baudot for transmission? Also, when the loss of resolution--or resend the actual bits-on-tape? (BTW, their deskfax image was only about 4"x6".)

Someone else expressed interested, and I think it's definitely on-topic.

I must admit I had prejudice that Western Union was an old "fuddy-duddy" company stuck in the past and not very forward looking. The WU Tech Review of the 1950s clearly shows that's not true--they had labs, scientists, and engineers working on the state of the art of that time in communications and administration.

I am also surprised at the overall state of the art of data communications of the 1950s--it's far more advanced that I expected. The WU private network systems were like a email of today--stick an address on top and your message will reach them. While the workhorse lines were quite slow, they were prepared to use voice grade circuits to the max of the time (about 2000 baud) if the need arose, say from higher speed computer-to-computer transmissions.

I need to find a library with their Annual Reports which hopefully have some traffic statistics in them.

The Oslin book does point out some problems in this era, some of which were labor and govt relations. I need to study it more carefully to get the details, but it appears ITT (back when it was actually in the telecom business) had govt influence and got favorable treatment at WU's expense for intl traffic. WU had used boys to be messengers from home-office delivery but apparently unions forced them to use adults at much higher pay scale and others were paid well. I knew someone who worked for WU in 1978 as entry level operator and was paid very well for that kind of work. Today, 50 years later, it seems newspapers use fewer kids and more adults for home delivery. In more recent years, Oslin says MCI forced AT&T to end big discounts to WU for its services which was a person. Oslin also felt AT&T's TWX service got better and unfair govt treatment at WU's expense.