Printing Telegraphy... A New Era Begins

Several other automatic telegraphic devices were being promoted, but (Kent) Cooper and engineers in the Traffic Department decided Krum’s machine held the most promise for their purposes. Tests got under way. In the Associated Press headquarters, which had been moved seven blocks from the old Western Union building to 51 Chambers Street, a sending operator sat at a keyboard similar to that of an ordinary typewriter. As he struck the keys, copying the dispatches before him, the machine perforated a paper tape with a series of holes, each combination representing a letter. The tape fed into a box-like transmitter which transformed the tape perforations into electrical impulses and sent them along the wires into the receiving machines in newspaper offices. These impulses actuated telegraph relays and set the receiving Morkrum machines automatically reproducing the letters which the sending operators were typing miles away.

The tests demonstrated that the Morkrum could transmit news hour after hour at the rate of sixty words a minute and the copy was delivered clean and uniform. Thus began the slow extension of Morkrum transmission to the whole leased wire system, replacing the “brass pounding” Morse keys. It was a transition that required years and until it was completed both Morse and Morkrum worked side by side in many places.

An interesting story appeared recently in “The AP World,”[5] giving some recollections of AP’s first field maintenance man, Royal (Roy) Bailey, then aged 71 and living in retirement in California. He still remembers the AP’s first printing telegraph machines, the article says; in fact, he helped make them, for he was a mechanic in the Morkrum Company’s factory in Chicago. When the Morkrum Company shipped the first machines to AP headquarters, Bailey went along with the machines to install and maintain them, although he remained on the Morkrum Company’s payroll. He eventually installed AP printers all over New York City and Connecticut, in Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, and in Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. He recalls that Morse telegraphers “used to groan when they first saw him.” The early teleprinters were hard to keep synchronized, Bailey further recalls, and copy boys had to check the speed frequently by sighting the striped motor flywheel through a tuning fork. (Many of those copy boys, he says, including Mickey Burt and Henry Elling, became AP engineers.)

As the experimental and developmental work continued at the Morkrum plant, Howard Krum studied all types of start-stop systems and found that synchronous control was the basis of all systems. After experimenting with various ideas his thoughts turned to a plan to make the start of the receiving unit somewhat independent of the transmitting unit start, thus avoiding irregularities then present in transmitter start devices. This idea led to the construction of a permutation-code, start-stop system, using segmented commutators with rotating brush distributors at both transmitting and receiving units and a start magnet for each to control start-stop operation.

In this system the transmitter start magnet, when energized, releases the transmitting brush, which immediately contacts the first segment to transmit a start pulse to operate the receiver start magnet; the five-unit-code signal combination follows and both transmitting and receiving units are stopped. The apparatus was applied to control the selecting and printing mechanism of the Blickensdoerfer typewheel typewriter and named the “Morkrum Green Code.” This improved apparatus soon replaced the Blue Code printer at Associated Press and other installations (see figs. 7 and 7A).

In this connection the following additional comments of Mr. Bailey may be of interest:[6]

In 1919 I installed the New York-Washington circuit, with drops at Philadelphia and Baltimore. This was a new type of printer using what we called the Green Code. This was considered an improvement over the old Blue Code, which meant a rearrangement of the receiving mechanism, but still the machines made use of a typewheel....

Our biggest job of all came in 1923 when we changed over all the old Blue Code typewheel printers in the New York area to the new style L. C. Smith typebar printers using Green Code. (Morkrum bought L. C. Smith typewriters and added new machinery to them. Those printers became the famous Model 12.)

As we have seen, a number of inventors had patented ways and means to adopt the five-unit code for operating a telegraph printer system by the transmission of a start pulse to start both transmitting apparatus and the distant receiving apparatus at the same time, followed by transmission of a selected code and a stop pulse. To achieve successful operation, very close speed adjustment was required. At first, this was achieved by the use of governed motors and, later, when accurately timed, 60-cycle alternating current became available, the problem of synchronous operation of send and receive stations was solved by the use of synchronous motors.

Telegraph printer systems of this type were used by telegraph companies for city-to-city transmission of telegrams and by news-gathering and -distributing organizations to transmit the news from headquarters to newspapers in different cities. While start-stop systems of this type were used successfully on press circuits and on telegraph message station-to-station circuitry, trouble was experienced when a number of printer send-receive units were set up in an intercommunicating system. Here it was found that the receiver start was not always in time with the transmitter start, due to varying line circuit conditions and a variation in the start release mechanism at connected stations.

It seems odd that synchronous systems, where both transmitter and receiver were started at the same time (requiring both transmitter and receiver to maintain synchronism), held the field for so long a time, thus limiting telegraph transmission to one-way operation.

It evidently took a mind not bound or hampered by the standard and accepted way of operating synchronous systems to discard such old ideas and to set forth boldly on a new pattern which, in reality, differed but slightly from the then-established synchronous systems, and to sow the seed for starting further developments leading to the present telegraph typewriter, TWX, and TELEX intercommunicating systems. Such a man was Howard L. Krum, who, in further thinking on the subject, came upon the almost simple idea of having the transmitter start the receiver rather than having them both start at the same time. This arrangement required higher speed operation of the receiver and therefore the receiving code pulse positions were spread over a shorter area, which meant progressively decreasing the angular division of the receiving members. Then, to set the received start pulse in the most favorable position with relation to the following code signal reception, an orientation adjustment of the receiver start position was provided.

(Note: On June 20, 1961, Kleinschmidt wrote to Howard Krum—then in retirement in California—giving a short description of the Morkrum Company activities, including the wording of the above last two paragraphs, and asking him to write the Morkrum story. Howard Krum replied on July 3, 1961, indicating his approval and saying that he would be glad to put together some notes for Kleinschmidt. It was quite a shock, therefore, when a letter was received from Howard Krum’s son, Charles, in September of 1961, telling of his father’s sudden serious illness. Then, regretfully, it was not long afterwards that word was received of Howard Krum’s death on November 13, 1961.)

Howard Krum’s improved method for operating start-stop, permutation-code telegraph systems was first applied to the Morkrum Green Code apparatus to control the selecting and printing operations of the Blickensdoerfer typewheel typewriter.

At this time the Kleinschmidt company and other manufacturers were starting to produce permutation-code, start-stop telegraph printers using typebar printing like the more modern typewriters which began rapidly to replace the Blickensdoerfer, the Hammond, and the other typewheel printing typewriters. Observing this situation, the Morkrum Company started intensive development work to produce the No. 12 typebar page printer, using the typebars and operating mechanism of the L. C. Smith typewriter and platen of a Woodstock typewriter (fig. 8).

Further developments produced the Morkrum No. 11 tape printer which used the Baudot combiner method for selecting and printing characters under control of start-stop, send-receive devices. The No. 11 was a small, compact tape printer operating at fifty words per minute. Quite a number were put into service at hotels and elsewhere for local message service (fig. 9).

The new No. 12 typebar page printer found numerous applications. It replaced the Green Code and the earlier Blue Code wherever used. The new No. 12 was installed at Western Union, on some railroads, and in the Chicago Police telegraph system. The No. 12s were also installed by Postal Telegraph on intercity circuits and used as receiving units for the Postal Multiplex. The Postal Multiplex had been designed by Morkrum and Postal engineers with the consultant assistance of Donald Murray who was a friendly associate and had a license agreement with the Morkrum Company covering some of his patents. A few No. 12 Morkrums were shipped abroad for use with the Murray Multiplex; the British Post Office Telegraph and the Australian Telegraph Administration were customers.

Late in 1924 the Morkrum Company and the Kleinschmidt Electric Company joined to form the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation. A story telling of the union of these two companies was published by Fortune magazine in March of 1932.[7]

Before going to that story, it may be of interest to describe an important event concerning the change in the supply of electric power from direct current to 60-cycle alternating current and the final timing to exactly 60 cycles per second of all A.C. power supplies so that our electric clocks may be connected to an A.C. outlet and give correct time.

The advent of correctly timed, 60-cycle A.C. electric power, available throughout the nation, was a great boon to the designers of printing telegraph apparatus and some types of facsimile telegraph and picture transmitting systems. In prior years, overline synchronization of send and receive apparatus was always a problem and never perfect. Today, synchronizing apparatus between terminals becomes the simple matter of providing 60-cycle A.C. synchronous motors. Just plug into a power outlet and you have “sync”!

Henry Ellis Warren, a clock maker, noting the change in electric power service from direct current to 60-cycle alternating current, set about to build a motor to operate at 60-cycle speed but found that the 60-cycle frequency did not always hold to form, and when applied to running a clock, did not hold correct time.

The following excerpt, from The Romance of Time,[8] tells of Warren’s activities which led to synchronizing 60-cycle alternating current to exact time:

Synchronous Electric Time

One of the most important of all contributions to horology is the work of an American who has earned the title, “Father of Electric Time.”

Henry Ellis Warren was graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894. In 1907 he married and settled in Ashland, Massachusetts. Here it was that he began to work out his idea for electrically operated timepieces.

His first product was an ingenious battery-operated clock. In 1914 he organized the Warren Clock Company and set up production in a barn on his farm. Yet he knew the battery clock was not his goal, for direct current offered no means of accurate regulation. Direct current flows constantly in one direction only, like water down a river or like the passage of time. On the other hand, alternating current changes direction regularly, like the oscillation of the balance wheel in a watch. But instead of the usual five times a second of the balance wheel, most alternating current completes its trip forward and backward sixty times a second. Obviously, a clock “geared” to such a frequency would run as reliably as the current.

In 1916, after several years of extensive experimentation, Warren developed a motor which would start by itself, run on alternating current, and carry without difficulty the load of reduction gears driving the clock hands. It could also handle the cams and contacts of an alarm clock or set in motion a striking or chiming mechanism.

Then came the test. He plugged the clock into the power socket. It commenced to run. Weeks of observation and checking showed an irregular error of as much as ten to fifteen minutes a day.

Convinced that his clock was right, Warren discovered that the alternating current frequency delivered to his barn factory was off half a cycle per second—59½ and not 60 cycles. This slight deflection would produce that much time loss in a 24-hour run. When he informed the electric company of this error, he was met at first with polite disbelief. Yet he showed such a comprehensive knowledge of the subject that the company began to recheck their standards.

Warren built several more synchronous clocks and a master regulator of his own design for power-station use. On one dial of his master clock there were two hands, black and gold. The black hand was connected to an accurately adjusted pendulum clock, beating seconds. The gold hand was driven by the gear train of one of his electric clocks. As long as the two hands revolved together, the current cycles were exactly 60 per second. Set up in a power station, this allowed the operator to adjust the turbine generators as needed to keep the two hands of the master clock together. Thus all other properly set electric clocks on the same system would keep the same time automatically.

The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston tried out the master clock on October 23, 1916. Since then this regulation has continued.

Other power companies adopted Warren’s master clock. Today virtually all alternating current furnished in America is similarly checked. Practical electric time is available at the light socket almost everywhere. But there are additional benefits.

Standardizing the frequency expanded the market for current to run the increasing number of clocks in use. Yet, from the consumer’s point of view, each clock draws little current, costing but a few pennies a month. Uniform frequency also gave more even speeds in motor-driven machinery, with a resultant improvement in product. It made easier the joining of one power station to another. Synchronous motors used in certain meters and recorders produced better, more accurate records at lower cost.

The Warren enterprise expanded rapidly. The battery clock was discontinued. The red barn was no longer large enough, and new space was acquired. The trade mark “Telechron,” meaning “time from a distance” (from two Greek words), was used to identify all products of the company. The firm name was changed to stress the name Telechron, and in 1952 a merger was made with the General Electric Company. Plants are now operated in Worcester as well as in Ashland, Massachusetts.

And now back to the telegraph field....

CHAPTER 4
Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation
(later renamed “Teletype Corporation”)

During and after the first world war, both the Morkrum Company and the Kleinschmidt Electric Company were progressively developing and producing telegraph apparatus and bringing out new and improved operating devices to a point where conflicting patents were at issue. This meant infringement litigation which might destroy both companies. Neither company could obtain orders in sufficient quantity to make the manufacturing of apparatus profitable, and, with costly development work at hand, more capital investment was a continuous requirement.

The following excerpts from the March 1932 issue of Fortune[9] tells of the final joining of the two companies.

The Morkrum Co. had no profits to show for its efforts, and one can be fairly safe in assuming that no other maker of telegraph printers made profits. There were competitors, of course. Even the first telegraph invented by Samuel Morse had a printer, but it printed in dots and dashes instead of in letters of the English alphabet. That original Morse printer was abandoned as far back as 1844 because a man who could be trained to read dots and dashes could just as easily be trained to listen to them. The problem of getting a printer to print the alphabet was faced by inventors more than half a century ago, and it was not really a difficult problem. The difficulty was to invent a printer that was not too complicated and delicate to be reliable, that was simple enough to be manufactured for a few hundred instead of a few thousand dollars.

This difficulty occupied many minds other than the Morton-Krum intelligences. The most noteworthy of Morkrum Co.’s rivals in printer-making was Edward Kleinschmidt, an inventor who had all the inventor’s legendary devotion to his task and to nothing else. His creations included a vaccination shield, an automatic fishing reel, and the perfection of the Wheatstone perforator. He had been tinkering with a telegraph printer in one form and another since the beginning of the century. In 1917 his project was revamped. It had the financial backing of Charles B. Goodspeed, of the Buckeye Steel Casting Co.; Paul M. Benedict, assistant to the president of the C. B. & Q.; Edward Moore, son of Judge Moore of American Can fame; Eldon Bisbee, a New York lawyer; and one of Mr. Bisbee’s legal clients, Albert Henry Wiggin, then president of the Chase National Bank. It was Mr. Goodspeed, a quiet, retiring gentleman, who supplied most of the corporate (as distinct from inventive) energy of the Kleinschmidt Electric Co....

In the years from 1917 to 1924 the Kleinschmidt and the Morkrum companies became the leading makers of telegraph printers, but they did not have an easy row to hoe. Their only possible customers were the two great telegraph companies, the Telephone company, the railroads, and an occasional outside business such as a press association. The competition was disheartening, and it became keener with the elevation of Sterling, son of Joy Morton, to the presidency of the Morkrum Co., an elevation that was mainly a War-time accident, for Sterling Morton had resigned from his father’s company to enlist in the Army, had been rejected because of a small steel plate in his anatomy, and had chosen the Morkrum Co. as an alternative. Engineering progress was made, sometimes under ludicrous circumstances.

There was one occasion when Sterling Morton, about to sail for Europe, heard that the Kleinschmidt Co. was about to bring out a simplex printer. Up to that time both companies had been making printers for use with multiplex machines. Mr. Morton was afraid that Mr. Kleinschmidt was about to anticipate him in the simplex development which was the forerunner of the present teletypewriter. This was a contingency which Mr. Morton could not well permit. On the spur of the moment, he called on Howard Krum, who happened to be in New York. They bought a drawing board, hired a room at the Princeton Club, and worked for twenty-four hours trying to design such a machine. Completely baffled by one small detail, they gave up and took a bus for Coney Island. On the way, Howard Krum doubled up in sudden ecstacy and inspiration. They rushed from the bus at Coney Island, entered a soda fountain, and on the spot designed the machine on the back of an envelope. This simplex machine of the Morkrum Co. and the one developed by Kleinschmidt at the same time are the machines which make Teletype commercially important, the substance of the business today.

But engineering progress was not business progress. Both companies from the standpoint of profits were failures. Their few customers played them off against each other. In despair, they were both willing to sell out. At one point Mr. Goodspeed offered the Kleinschmidt company to Mr. Newcomb Carlton of Western Union for $412,000, the amount invested in it. Mr. Morton sold his company in all but fact to Mr. Charles G. du Bois, then president of Western Electric, but Mr. du Bois went off to Europe, and his substitute refused to see any merit in the deal. So it fell through. Unable to sell themselves to their customers, they tried selling themselves to each other. In 1923 Messrs. Goodspeed and Morton came to terms. The Morkrum Co. signed the agreement and, everything arranged, Mr. Goodspeed went off to bicycle with his wife in South Africa—whereupon his company suddenly changed its mind.

That was the situation of these two unfortunate companies in 1924 when Mr. Morton started a suit for patent infringement against his rivals. A counter suit was promptly filed. Mr. Goodspeed was quite right when he said the suits would ruin both—there was every prospect that by the time the courts had settled things, the patents would have been in such a snarl that neither could do anything. The suit, in fact, was Sterling Morton’s way of bringing matters to a head. So, figuratively speaking, on the courthouse steps they merged.

The terms of the merger as embodied in the six-line agreement (it was later made over into a twenty-five-page legal document which concluded by saying that in case of dispute the six-line agreement should be the final authority) were these: each of the old companies received a half interest in the common stock (10,000 shares) of the new company; 15,000 shares (callable at 105) of the new company’s preferred stock should be divided according to the assets of the old companies. Actually, 13,979 shares of preferred were issued, the majority going to the Morkrum group.

And so it was that the agreement to join both companies under the name Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation was consummated and chartered in the State of Delaware on December 29, 1924, with Sterling Morton as President, Howard L. Krum as Vice President in charge of manufacturing, and Edward E. Kleinschmidt as Vice President in charge of development, patents and foreign sales.

One of the first decisions to make was whether the Kleinschmidt plant in Long Island City or the Morkrum plant in Chicago would be the headquarters for the new company. The Kleinschmidt company was on a 27,000-foot leased floor in a building which R. H. Macy Company had just purchased to use for a warehouse, and negotiations had been going on for some time for the purchase of the Kleinschmidt lease—the sum of $25,000.00 having been offered. When the union of the two companies was decided upon, an agreement to vacate on the terms offered was signed, and the Kleinschmidt firm moved to the Morkrum-owned plant in Chicago.

Bringing together the engineering talent and patents of the two companies had an immediate effect toward further progress. The first thing the new company set out to do, through consolidation of their past efforts, was to perfect a satisfactory start-stop-operated tape printer for the Western Union Telegraph Company to use for circuit extension to customers who were extensively using the telegraph for immediate, written communication. (This was to speed up telegraphic communication and eliminate the need for messenger service which had been the custom.) The Morkrum company had submitted their start-stop-operated Baudot tape printer, and the Kleinschmidt company had proposed the Western Union No. 22 tape printer in a redesign to start-stop operation. Now, the new company was able to combine both plans and as a result came up with their first development, a typebar, start-stop-operated, tape printer, the No. 14 (see figure 10). In the final design, Howard Krum and his production engineers took a large part. After tests and evaluation, Western Union’s first order was for 10,000 machines at $317.00 each. This amounted to a total of $3,170,000.00. No such quantity had ever been heard of before!

It is quite evident that while the two companies were separated, each coming up with improved and new designs of telegraph apparatus, there was a lack of decision by telegraph companies as to which type of apparatus to adopt in expanding their operations, and therefore they did not buy in quantity. The largest previous order to the Kleinschmidt Electric Company was for 800 No. 22 typebar tape printers for the Western Union Multiplex.

At Morkrum-Kleinschmidt more space was needed. The corner property on Wrightwood Avenue adjoining the Morkrum plant was purchased, and a four-story building was erected.

The design of a telegraph typewriter that would be more efficient and require a minimum of maintenance service was the most important project, and Morkrum-Kleinschmidt was working with Bell Laboratories engineers endeavoring to meet all the requirements of the Bell Telephone system. A typebar printer with a stationary printing platen and moving typebar printing unit was specified. These requirements were finally met with the design of the No. 15 page printer to operate at 60 words per minute, and manufacture of this apparatus was started in 1927 (see figure 11). The No. 15 page printer became the standard for nationwide intercommunicating telegraph service for many years.

In 1926, soon after the No. 14 tape printer was put into service, Morkrum-Kleinschmidt received a request from the police department of Berlin, Germany, for detailed information, stating that they were interested in the purchase of about sixty No. 14 printers. The letter asked if Morkrum-Kleinschmidt was represented by an agent in Germany whom they could contact. At an executive meeting, Mr. Morton and Mr. Krum asked Mr. Kleinschmidt to take care of this matter since his company, before joining them, had sold apparatus in some foreign countries. After further correspondence with the Berlin police officials, Kleinschmidt decided personally to take a No. 14 printer to Germany and arrange for a representative there. After visiting and conferring with several companies experienced in the telegraph and associated apparatus field, a satisfactory arrangement was consummated with the C. Lorenz Company, on October 25, 1926, for the manufacture and sale of Morkrum-Kleinschmidt equipment in Germany, on a royalty-licensing basis. At that time the Lorenz company manufactured telegraph and telephone equipment and railway signaling apparatus. Their engineering department was under the supervision of Dr. Gerhard Grimsen who took the matter in hand for further exploitation toward an intercommunicating printing telegraph system, using the No. 15 page teletypewriter. Siemens & Halske, the principal manufacturers of telegraph equipment in Germany, were also licensed by the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation, on June 1, 1929, with the consent of the Lorenz company.

(As may be seen in the following chapter, it was these licensing arrangements which led to the establishment of the TELEX intercommunicating teleprinter system in Europe.)

In early 1927 the well-known newspaper publisher, Mr. Frank E. Gannett, came to Morkrum-Kleinschmidt, bringing his company’s engineer, Mr. Walter Morey, who had heard of various attempts to operate a typesetting machine, such as Linotype or Intertype, directly from the telegraph. Mr. Gannett said, “We have telegraph typewriters in our news rooms that record the news as transmitted from the Associated Press and the United Press, and that is fine. Now, why not go a step further and operate our typesetting machines directly from the telegraph circuit? If you can develop such a device, I will help finance the project.”

Indeed, after some study of the matter, the possibility of devising such a system seemed entirely feasible and the development of suitable apparatus was turned over to the research and development department. A workable plan was soon put together and a separate company, the Teletypesetter Company, was organized, with Mr. Gannett joining financially. Edward Kleinschmidt was elected president. Development proceeded and a complete set of apparatus was set up and publicly demonstrated for the first time on December 6, 1928, at one of Mr. Gannett’s newspapers, The Times Union of Rochester, New York. Teletypesetter equipment was subsequently manufactured for several installations. After the Western Electric Company purchased the Teletype Corporation in 1930, the Teletypesetter Company was sold to the Fairchild Company. Teletypesetter equipment is now in universal use by most newspapers and the larger printing companies.

During the period that the United States’ business cycle was on a continuous upswing (during the late 1920s), securities sales on the New York Stock Exchange were going to constantly higher volume, and the old step-by-step stock ticker did not, by large margins, keep pace in recording stock share transactions. There was a cry for a higher speed stock ticker; in fact, the Stock Exchange officials told Morkrum-Kleinschmidt that they would be happy to convert the entire system if they could get higher speed.

An adaptation of the five-unit-code, start-stop system seemed the solution and the Research and Development department set out to develop suitable apparatus. Several ideas were studied and, because of the frequent changes from letters to figures, requiring printing in separate rows on the tape, a six-unit code was adapted instead in which combinations for a figure included the sixth selecting pulse to operate the figures print hammer and block the letters print hammer.

The Morkrum-Kleinschmidt company was soon able to show the Stock Exchange people a stock ticker operating on a telegraph system that worked at twice the speed of the step-by-step-operated tickers then in use. A speed of 500 printing operations per minute could be obtained, thus attaining a one-hundred-percent increase in the transmitting and recording of stock quotations on the tape (see figure 12). The Stock Exchange ticker service company ordered 15,000 of these high-speed tickers and the Western Union Telegraph Company also ordered a quantity for their national stock quotations distributing systems.

As business of the combined Morkrum and Kleinschmidt companies went along, it was thought that the name “Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation” was a pretty big mouthful and that a simpler name more characteristic of its products would be better. The name “Teletype” was suggested, and in the year 1928 the name change to “Teletype Corporation” was made. The exact origin of the word “teletype” is not known but it is no doubt one of the abbreviated forms of the words “telegraph typewriter” which were used over the years. In literature, in the early 1900s, we find that the word “teletype,” in speaking of printing telegraph equipment, and other shortened forms, such as “telewriter” and “teletyper,” were used interchangeably.

Kleinschmidt’s son, Edward F., who studied electrical engineering at Steven’s Institute and at Northwestern University, was employed as development engineer by the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt company where he assisted in the design of projects at hand, and, during 1929, produced a system and apparatus for transmitting and recording printed characters by the successive transmission of dots arranged in a pattern to form letters. While this system required a higher signaling frequency, it was thought to be superior to permutation-code transmission over radio circuits where electrostatic interference is experienced, since, in the dot pattern transmission, electrostatic interference up to a degree will not change the readability of a transmitted letter.

The system was in test operation to prove its efficiency over radio circuits where considerable static interference was experienced. Upon hearing of this new telegraph for the radio, Mr. R. Stanley Dollar became interested in the use of this communicating system for his steamship line. There was considerable correspondence in this matter during mid-1930, just prior to the sale of Teletype; however, neither AT&T nor Western Electric was interested in further promoting this new radio telegraph, so the matter was dropped.

Business activities of Teletype Corporation were now growing rapidly and with good profit. The capital structure of 10,000 shares was wholly inadequate, so by a 15-to-1 stock dividend the capital structure was raised to 150,000 shares, and dividends on an annual basis of $12.00 were paid.

The successful development of apparatus for different applications useful in the telegraph field was largely due to the close cooperation between the research-development and the manufacturing departments of the organization. Howard Krum had expert engineers and designers in his department, Kleinschmidt brought his leading engineers and designers from the Long Island City plant, and there was a definite spirit of cooperation all around.

To quote again from the Fortune magazine story:[10]

As the years up to 1925, when the Kleinschmidt-Morkrum merger took place, were wanderings in a profitless desert, so the years from 1925 to 1930 found the teletype in a land of milk and honey. Mr. Morton, however, was inclined to think that a company which had only two or three major customers is not strongly placed. Furthermore (and by the spring of 1930), at least one of those customers was actively in the market as a Teletype purchaser. This buyer was Colonel Sosthenes Behn, whose International Telephone & Telegraph Co. includes Postal Telegraph at home in addition to many communication and manufacturing companies abroad. With Colonel Behn wanting to buy and Mr. Morton wanting to sell, negotiations rapidly proceeded to a point at which Mr. Morton, at least, thought the deal was almost concluded. But while Mr. Morton and the Colonel were discussing the prospective acquisition, into the Colonel’s office walked a man who has no other place in this story except that he happened to interrupt at this moment. As this gentleman was introduced, he asked whether Mr. Morton were related to Joy or Paul Morton. When Mr. Morton admitted that they were his father and uncle, the man turned to Colonel Behn and said in jest: “Better watch your step. That’s a smart family.” Only Colonel Behn knows whether he gave that remark any weight, but the point is that the negotiations suddenly collapsed, and that the visitor’s remark about the smart family still lives vividly in Mr. Morton’s memory.

This setback was not a setback at all to such a negotiator as Mr. Morton. Two months later, in May, 1930, you find him walking into the office of Clarence G. Stoll, vice president of Western Electric, A. T. & T.’s manufacturing subsidiary. This time there had been no preliminaries. Mr. Stoll rose from his desk and said: “Good morning. What can I do for you?”

“Do you want to buy Teletype?”

“Is it for sale?”

“Yes, at a price.”

“All right. Let’s get down to business.”

They got down to business on the spot, and they remained at it for three solid days in Mr. Stoll’s office. The agreement as reached called for A. T. & T. to pay off the preferred stock of Teletype, 13,979 shares callable at 105, and to give one share of A. T. & T. in exchange for each common share of Teletype. The A. T. & T. shares were worth about $200, so the price came to upwards of $30,000,000—plus, of course, the $1,467,795 for retiring the Teletype preferred.

It should be noted here that this deal to take over Teletype on a share-for-share basis was exclusive of foreign patent rights but did include patent rights in Canada and Mexico.

The sale to Western Electric was closed on September 30, 1930. Mr. Stoll of that company was made president. Howard Krum continued on as vice president and was a leader in developing a number of commendable devices, including a system for transmitting messages in scrambled, untranslatable code form and receiving such scrambled code in perfect message form. Mr. Morton was retained as consultant. Edward Kleinschmidt made an arrangement to do development work for the new organization in a laboratory of his own, assigning all inventions to the Teletype Corporation (see page 50).

After Kleinschmidt left Teletype, his assistant, Albert H. Reiber, carried on as head of Research and Development for a short while before his untimely death. In the meantime, Walter J. Zenner had advanced and, in 1935, became Department Chief and later Vice President in Charge of Research and Development. Under Zenner’s direction a number of new devices in the teleprinter field were developed, including ultra-high-speed tape-perforating and tape-controlled transmitting devices, as well as a high-speed stock ticker operating at 900 characters per minute (introduced in 1964) to replace the earlier Morkrum-Kleinschmidt ticker which operated at 500 characters per minute. Some 94 patents were issued in his name, which have contributed greatly to the growth of the Teletype Corporation.[11]

On May 15, 1940, Howard Krum and Edward E. Kleinschmidt were both honored by The Franklin Institute and awarded the John Price Wetherill Medal, each one “For his Part in the Development of a Successful Electrically Operated Duplicate Typewriting Machine Now Known as the Teletypewriter,” (Quoted from the medal certificate.)

Howard Krum later also received an award as Modern Pioneer from the National Manufacturers Association. Edward E. Kleinschmidt, on April 19, 1958, was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

To continue: After the sale of patent rights in Canada, Mexico, and the United States to Western Electric, there remained the European and other foreign patent rights still with the original Morkrum and Kleinschmidt investors. The International Telephone and Telegraph Company wanted these rights, and, after negotiations in New York, a price was set for their purchase through the Creed Company in London, then owned by IT&T. Edward Kleinschmidt was sent to London in 1930 to close the deal. Some changes to the sales contract were requested by Creed which kept the cables busy by Kleinschmidt in asking for approval from A. T. & T. and Western Electric lawyers. Finally, upon all-around approval, the contract was signed at the previously-agreed-to price of one and a quarter million dollars.

CHAPTER 5
Teletypewriter Intercommunication Expands

TELEX

As a result of the acquisition of patents of the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company by the Lorenz company, Siemens & Halske, and, later, the Creed company in England, all of which we have discussed briefly, teletypewriter intercommunicating expanded rapidly. In just a short time, through the cooperation of these companies, it spread over all of Europe and was named TELEX (TELeprinter EXchange Service).

Dr. Gerhard Grimsen of the Lorenz company, in a letter to Edward E. Kleinschmidt, dated July 11, 1962, states, in part (slightly edited):

The story of printing telegraph apparatus using an equal length code in the Lorenz Co. commences in 1927 with the acquisition of the most important patents of the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Co.

Before then, the Lorenz people were busy in manufacturing Morse apparatus and delivering exchange tickers which used the Hughes code. The transmitter had a piano keyboard, the receiver was a page printer with a moving type wheel.... The biggest network of this kind was installed in the Berlin Police service (with one transmitter and about 300 receivers). The connections between the headquarters and the substations were built by using guttapercha cable lines owned by the police administration. This broadcasting network was erected around 1907. By 1927 the cables had aged, by normal corrosion, to such a degree that instead of 110-volt double current transmitting voltage, little by little, up to 220 volts was necessary for a fairly satisfying operation. Also, the maintenance of the apparatus became more costly.

This was the situation when some communication experts of the police and the post administration made the first studies about the newest telegraph technique in the U. S. A.... They found that the start-stop, five-unit tape printer, the Model 14, developed and manufactured by the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt company, would be the best instrument to replace the old ones in the police service as well as in the telegraph business of the German post administration.

Of special importance to the police service was the fact that by introducing this apparatus, it was not necessary to build a new network because now it became possible to rent normal telephone lines using single current, 40-milliampere, 60-volt current only.

Siemens and Halske engineers, in 1925, had designed a teleprinter using the five-unit-code, start-stop principle. This was manufactured and improvements added, including the new start-stop method developed by Morkrum-Kleinschmidt. The Creed company, which had started manufacture of start-stop teleprinters before 1930, having purchased several Morkrum printers before the consolidation of that company with the Kleinschmidt company, also designed a teleprinter for the new five-unit-code, start-stop system.

In another write-up, Dr. Grimsen states that after the Siemens company came into the picture, a fully automatic teleprinter network was started in 1933 with a trial installation between Berlin and Hamburg for about forty private subscribers. The results were so encouraging that the German Reichspost continued the work, and five years later the TELEX system contained about 10,000 subscribers.

TELEX service was introduced in Great Britain in 1932 and was worked over the telephone network, using a single-tone voice frequency carrier signal which was keyed on and off by the teleprinter transmitter. (From Freebody’s Telegraphy.)[12]

Interconnection for TELEX service was made by dialing a subscriber as in telephone operation. TELEX directories then, as now, gave the call numbers of subscribers. Types of answerback devices were designed in both England and Germany which finally developed into an arrangement whereby the calling subscriber would, after dialing a number, press a special key, the shifted D key—named the “Who-Are-You?” button—which would cause the transmission of a signal code automatically to activate the called teletypewriter mechanism into transmitting its TELEX number.

Further apparatus, a device to punch the code in a tape and a punched-tape-controlled transmitter, was soon added.

The Siemens company also developed and built completely automatic switching equipment for the TELEX system which is used by many telegraph administrations.

Through the cooperation of the companies who were manufacturing teleprinters and associated equipment, the many problems that appeared were eventually solved to improve the apparatus and bring the TELEX system to eventual perfection for worldwide telegraph communications. (At the time of this writing, according to statistics, there are nearly 1,000,000 TELEX subscribers throughout the world.)

One of the problems faced in setting up such a worldwide system was that of standardizing the code and operating speed. At the time of Kleinschmidt’s stay in London in 1930 to close negotiations with Creed for the sale of Morkrum-Kleinschmidt’s foreign rights, he met Mr. Martin Feuerhahn of the German Telegraph Administration who at that time was in conference with Creed and representatives from the British Telegraph Administration as to standardizing on an alphabet and telegraph code for international communications. Mr. Feuerhahn argued for the adoption of the American Murray alphabet and code, stating that he already had the approval and consent of the French, Italian, and Belgian telegraph administrations.

Mr. Feuerhahn and Kleinschmidt spent some hours together. After their return to their respective countries, Kleinschmidt received a letter from Mr. Feuerhahn referring to their talks and stating that he had been in correspondence with Mr. Benjamin of Western Union and Mr. Parker of Bell Laboratories with regard to code and other pertinent matters of standardization so that an International Teleprinter Exchange could be extended into the United States. Another letter dated October 10, 1931, reviewed the aforementioned standardization search.

The Murray alphabet and 7½-unit code were soon adopted and are still in use today in TELEX.

In later years, an association, the Consultative Committee on International Telegraph (CCIT—now the CCITT to include the telephone), was formed and met regularly to discuss problems and to set operating regulations for the TELEX apparatus in an intercommunicating system. The CCITT at this writing is still meeting regularly on worldwide standardization in both telegraph and telephone communications.

TELEX IN THE UNITED STATES AND TWX

In the United States, in November 1931, the Bell Telephone Companies announced an intercommunicating teletypewriter service, called TWX for short (TeletypeWriter eXchange), by which interconnections could be made by a switchboard operator as in telephone service. One of their first advertisements named it a “Telephone Typewriter Service, a service that typewrites by wire, a method of inter-office communication that has the quickness of the telephone, the flexibility of conversation, the accuracy of the typewriter, the authority of the printed word, the permanency of print.”[13] Tape-punching and tape-controlled transmitting apparatus was provided. This service allowed subscribers to carry on a typewritten conversation at a charge less than the cost of a telephone call, whether to local or to distant areas. The maximum speed of this equipment was limited to sixty words per minute.