Printing Telegraphy... A New Era Begins

by Edward E. Kleinschmidt

The Associated Press (AP) became interested in the Morkrum “Blue Code” printer system as a replacement for the low-speed Morse system which was being used to transmit news items to newspapers in many cities. Here, continuous transmission under control of a code-punched tape, as used in the Morse code system, was a requirement, so Messrs. Krum set to work and designed a keyboard-operated, five-unit, Baudot-code perforator and an automatic punched-tape-controlled transmitter. This apparatus was installed at the New York headquarters in 1915 and receiving printers were gradually installed throughout the Associated Press system. The following excerpt and picture ([fig. 6]) from Oliver Gramling’s book, AP—The Story of News,[4] describes the introduction of the system to the Associated Press:

The tide of news by telegraph had continued with the years. Facilities had been improved, the Morse clicked into virtually every town in the country, but the old method was the same. Day in and day out, sending operators took dispatches, translated them into the dash-dot of code, and the telegraph keys sent the signals on the circuits at a rate of twenty-five to thirty-five words a minute. In member newspaper offices along the line the Morse sounders clack-clacked busily and receiving operators translated the code symbols back into words, copying the stories in jerky spurts. The news of more than half a century had been handled that way.

For some time, however, Charles L. Krum, a Chicago cold-storage engineer, and his son Howard had been working to perfect an automatic machine which would send the printed word by wire at greater speed without the intermediary of code. They called their invention the Morkrum Telegraph Printer—coining the word Morkrum by combining the inventor’s name with the first syllable in the last name of Joy Morton, a Chicago businessman who financed them.

Fig. 6 A SENDING OPERATOR SAT AT A KEYBOARD LIKE THAT OF A TYPEWRITER.Reproduced from AP—The Story of News, by permission of Associated Press.

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.)