Printing Telegraphy... A New Era Begins

by Edward E. Kleinschmidt

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.

Fig. 12 Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Corporation Stock TickerPicture through courtesy of Teletype Corporation

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.