Printing Telegraphy... A New Era Begins

by Edward E. Kleinschmidt

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]