Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph 1892

 Today your humble editor received a real treasure!

A paper copy of Pope's "Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph" written in 1892.
This magnificent book is produced in paperback form by the Leopold Classic Library from a scanned copy, made by Google I believe.
I have a PDF of the scanned copy of the 1874 edition from the Internet Archive but nothing compares (at least to me) to being able to peruse such old documents in paper form.

 Inside this book is a fascinating look at the state of electricity and electrical apparatus at the end of the 19th Century. There is practical advise on the design, construction, and use of the telegraph. Also trouble shooting tips for when things don't work!

There are 185 illustrations in this book that help to show not only the principles that Pope is describing, but are also a pleasant snapshot of the state of the technology at the time. 

I have perused the PDF file quite a bit but I have to say that being able to flip back and forth and wander around the book in it's physical form really helps me to cement my understanding and gives me a great appreciation for the technicians and craftsmen who created these globe spanning systems even when their understanding of the fundamental science was primitive in the extreme.

 

There were several editions of this book. The Internet archive has at least three that I have found one from 1866, 1874 and one from 1899.

All the PDF copies are in good shape with the scanned illustrations being very clear.

The paper copy I have was produced from the best scanned copy that was available and has the same detailed and clear illustrations.

Of interest to those of us struggling to lear the code and improve our sending and copying is a short section at the very end of the book with "Hints for Learners". Definitely worth a gander.

I found this page, the last page of the text, to be particularly apropos to me and the Heritage Park's gang of happy amateurs.
I have included a photo of the page.

Enjoy
73

From the Chief Dispatcher Fall 2023

 MTC Calgary Fall 2023 Update

The Calgary “CG” Chapter of the Morse Telegraph Club has had a very busy summer!

Since May we have been slinging lightning and interpreting a day in the life of an agent operator twice a week, on Tuesday’s and Saturday’s, at Calgary’s Heritage Park. The park is fortunate to have four former Canadian Pacific Railway stations on the property, three of which are connected to the parks telegraph network. MTC Calgary has regularly occupied two of them, Laggan and Midnapore, practicing and perfecting our American Morse code skills and hooping up train orders to passing trains. We have also sent the names of countless guests up and down the wire and have put them in writing in telegrams. We have also shared stories about the local operator and his or her station as the centre of many towns across the prairies in days gone by.

Soon we will kick our efforts up a notch when Heritage Park’s annual Railway Days extravaganza happens once again. This year the event goes on Saturday, Sep 9 and Sunday, Sep 10 so mark your calendars! Not only will MTC Calgary be in Laggan and Midnapore stations, we will add Shepard station into the mix. MTC Calgary will also host a separate information booth which we will be sharing with members of the Victorian Society of Alberta. New this year will be a connection from this booth to the rest of the parks telegraph line, giving us a four station network. Once again members of Edmontons “MO” Chapter, all former railway telegraphers, will be joining us. It’s always a joy to stand back and watch the pros work the wires. 

 MTC Calgary also participated in two open houses at Champion Park this summer. The park is jointly owned by the Town of Okotoks and Foothills County. It has the former Canadian Pacific Railway station from Champion, Alberta (thus the name) on the property, along with a number of pieces of former CPR rolling stock. Chapter members staffed the station, slinging lightning and telling stories, as they do at Heritage Park. Two additional open houses are scheduled in September. The open houses provided a “proof of concept” opportunity for the Alberta Line Project. Using MorseKOB and the internet, Champion park was connected to the telegraph network at Heritage Park, and live Morse wire traffic was successfully exchanged between the stations at both places. It was a first for MTC Calgary and an exciting step for the larger line project.

This year has also seen the addition of three new members to the ranks of MTC Calgary, an encouraging sign for sure. To all those reading this who are not yet members of the Morse Telegraph Club, I encourage you to consider joining. Learning Morse code and sharing the science, art and history with folks is a lot of fun!

So, what does the fall and the New Year hold for us?

MTC Calgary will continue to be at Heritage Park demonstrating Morse telegraphy until Oct 7. While the park closes to the public that weekend, chapter members will meet on occasion to continue practicing until it gets too cold to do that. After that practice will continue online using MorseKOB and Zoom.

Having proven that the Alberta Line Project concept is viable, a formal rollout plan will be developed for 2024. If it goes well, every museum in southern Alberta that now has telegraph equipment sitting quietly collecting dust and rust, will be alive with the sounds of Morse code emitting from the sounder. I can see many road trips in our future!

I expect we will continue to occupy the stations at Heritage Park and may expand our efforts to more than 2 days per week. Feedback on the Champion Park open houses has been positive and hopefully the park will offer more public events throughout the year. MTC Calgary will be there too.

That’s all I have for now.

73

Ken Ashmead, President

MTC Calgary “CG” Chapter

After Action Report: First Active AlbertaMTCwire Link

Saturday August 12, 2023 marks an historic day for Landline Telegraphy in Alberta!

As part of the AlbertaMTC Line project a demonstration of the first long distance link between two museums with telegraph displays was inaugurated at 11:00 AM MDT with the simple message:

"WHAT AN HISTORIC DAY"

First Message!

The message was sent 35 km (22 mi) between the station in Champion Park South of Calgary and the landline telegraph network at Heritage Park in Calgary that links the Midnapore and Laggan stations. 

The Champion Park Telegraphers
Marilyn Maguire, Mia Salomakhin
Kevin Jepson

 The link culminates a summer of active landline experimentation and practice by members of the Calgary chapter (CG) of the Morse Telegraph club and the Heritage Park Morse Telegraph Club that started with our display at Supertrain back in April of this year.

The link utilized two of Chip Morgan's interfaces connected to small laptops hidden beneath the desks in the stations at Midnapore and Champion. The laptops running MorseKOB connected across the Internet to Wire 11 (the traditional chat wire) on our local KOBserver.

The inevitable hiccups were minor, and once set up, the link worked fairly well.

Using the link over the course of the day we encountered three kinds of issues. While not show stoppers, they were interesting to work through, and were related to issues with the connection at Heritage Park, equipment adjustments, and procedures.

The main connection issue was that the Heritage Park guest WiFi system blocks the port used by MorseKOB! I (Kevin) ended up using my old flip phone as a hot spot which worked fine until the battery died later in the afternoon.

The main equipment issue was also at Heritage Park and that was the adjustments of the sounder in Midnapore and the relay at Laggan. The current strength and signal speed on the line when using the KOB interface is different than what we normally have so that made some characters indistinct.

The procedure issues were interesting given the complexity of having THREE stations on the line. Key closer etiquette is a big one, call and response procedures are more important when it is not obvious where traffic is going to or coming from, and trying to handle three sets of guests around us in the stations at the same time can be tricky too!

The Champion Park Station

None of these issues are insurmountable and we are working on formalizing procedures and developing standard hardware setups to bring more permanent connectivity to the Railway and Historic Museums in Alberta and Western Canada.

A Historic first step indeed.

 Thanks to the members of the Calgary (CG) Chapter of the MTC and the Heritage Park MTC for their support and skills and to Heritage Park and Champion Park for letting us use their historic equipment to make this link!

 

The whole MTC crew at Champion
L to R
Ken Ashmead, Marilyn Maguire, Mia Salomakhin,
Kevin Jepson, Selwyn Morris

73
Ciao
Kevin Jepson
Instigator, "Wire-Chief", and acting Dispatcher for the AlbertaMTCwire Project.

Why the hoop for the engineer is so long!

 Imagine hooping to the engineer as one of these roared by in the dark!

One of these engines in action.

Insulators

 Found on FB

Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals both made arrowheads and spearheads out of Insulators. The telegraph companies got fed up with the knappers stealing their glass insulators that they would leave free ones piled up by the poles so they wouldn't have to repair the section taken down by the knappers.

Bird points made from them likewise exist but are fewer in number.

This style insulator, nicknamed "signal", is one of the most diversely colored styles produced by Hemingray from the 1880s to the 1940s . Colors exist in practically the entire spectrum! The example shown here is blue/green and you can see the point made by Ishi, at the museum is the same color Ishi, the last of the Yahi would Knapp anything he would find, often scavenging glass bottles from the University he worked at.

 

So invaluable was his lessons that his knapping style bore his name to the tool that’s used by Flint nappers today, the Ishi stick .

 

You can see here is one of the few photos of Ishi knapping and this one might be when he led a university expedition back to his native Yahi homeland in Northern California.

 

He would create points and give them away to children and anyone who visited him from 1911 until his death in 1916. The last authentic Ishi point sold at auction for a cool $27,000.00.

The First Nations Oneida born actor Graham Greene played him in the TV movie “the last of his tribe “

Last Associated Press Telegrapher

 

Editor's note: Aubrey passed away in June of 1999.

From the Internet Archive

 

The Oldest Surviving Associated Press Telegrapher

Aubrey Keel, W0AKL, 97 Years Young and Still Pounding Brass

by Neal McEwen, K5RW
Copyright © 1997,  Neal McEwen

---

I'd like for you to meet an acquaintance of mine. His name is Aubrey Keel. Aubrey was born in Indian Gap, Hamilton County, Texas in 1901. He became a telegraph operator during World War I for the Sante Fe Railroad. He practiced the profession of telegraphy in various capacities until the key was replaced by teletype machines in 1933 on Associated Press wires.

I met Aubrey at the local Morse Telegraph Club fall meeting. He was the most senior member by at least two decades. I was quite surprised to learn Aubrey was on the Internet; you may Email correspond with him at aekeel@juno.com.

The photo at the right shows Aubrey in front of the depot in Goldthwaite, Texas, where he learned telegraphy in 1917. The photo at the left shows Aubrey at the key making a tone tape for MTC members who could not attend the meeting.

Aubrey worked for the Sante Fe for a few years, then in 1926 he went to work for Associated Press, in Temple, Texas copying news stories. AP moved him to all the large cities in Texas, most of the time in Fort Worth. Besides press he copied stock market reports after the the close of the New York Stock Exchange. He entered lots of numbers and fractions on a stock market report form.

Aubrey recalls that press and market report operators had to be extremely proficient or they did not last long. He states that all the copying was done on a typewriter, or "mill" as they were called. A single error in market reports could cause an investor untold grief.

Press operators worked in close proximity to newspaper men. To improve the throughput of press traffic, the Phillips Code was used. Commonly used words were abbreviated and standardized in the Phillips Code book. (these little pocket sized books are very rare and prized by telegraphers and collectors alike.) For example, TD was Treasury Department, CHN was children, BOP was breach of promise. By using these abbreviations the effective speed could be significantly improved. Sending operators would send 30 to 35 words per minute. On the receiving end the operator would be typing 45 to 50 words a minute, as he typed the complete word, not the abbreviation.

Aubrey continued to work for the AP even after the last Morse circuit was closed. He worked in various other capacities and retired in 1966. He currently resides in Kansas City, where his last AP assignment took him. He enjoys ham radio, CW of course, and keeps in contact with friends via the airways and the Internet.

My thanks to Macalee Hime for the photos, and Tony Smith of Morsum Magnificat and Greg Raven for biographical information. For more information on Aubrey and the history of telegraphy at AP, see the February, 1994 issue of Morsum Magnificat. 

NYT News Wire recordings from 1951

 The newspapers got their stories across the wire via telegraph right up to the 1950s.

These audio recordings and transcriptions were created in 1951. 
I found the recordings created for the Morse Telegraph Club at the Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/details/NewYorkTimesMorseWireLastDay1951

The speed these old time telegraphers could send and receive at was phenomenal, the speeds here are a steady 60 WPM!

To give you a feel for the speed here is the first message, a recording of a news story sent by telegraphers Jack Goulette and Ralph Cahall over The New York Times Morse wire to the Times telegraph office in New York, at a speed up to 60 words a minute. Dan Reeves was the receiver in New York.:

Message Link

A transcription of the message follows, converted from the Phillips code that the telegraphers were actually sending of course.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

1w.

No. FOUR ....LEND— LEASE....(WAGGONER)

    WASHINGTON, April 7~—-The United States has formally demanded
again, in the face of a flat refusal, that the Soviet Union return
some 670 ships this government made available to its Russian ally
under the Lend~Lease agreement of the last war.

The demand was made on the highest level, with a note from
Secretary of State Dean Acheson handed yesterday to Alexander S.
Panyushkin, the Soviet Ambassador. The message answered a Soviet note
of March 21 stating that the United States had agreed to sell the ships
and declining therefore to consider their return.

Also for a second time, Secretary Acheson asked that United
States representatives be allowed to examine the vessels described by
Moscow as "badly worn out and for the most part unfit for navigation
in the open sea."

The Secretary emphasized that “the title to these vessels
remains in the Government of the United States regardless of their
condition." He therefore repeated the request that this government
be permitted to "examine all unserviceable vessels in order to
determine their ultimate disposition.”

By citing various joint statements and agreements between
Washington and Moscow going back four years, Mr. Acheson denied that
the United States had “agreed” to sell the ships to the Soviet Union.

                (MORE)

                    Huston

                        --mm655pm--

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Imagine working at that speed all day!

To add to the fun, these expert telegraphers could receive the message and translate it from the Phillips code in their head and type it into the their Mills IN REAL TIME!!!

73
Ciao
KJ Editor
and AlbertaMTCwire Wire-Chief

AlbertaMTCwire Project What is needed?

 In this second post on the proposal for the #AlbertaMTCwire I will try to outline a rough series of phases for the project.

Originally posted to the Alberta-MTC@groups.io list back in Nov 2022.

There are two sides to this project:
A) The collection of information about what Museums have telegraph equipment, what equipment is displayed, and what interest there might be in coming along for the ride :-)
B) The process of creating the actual system to link all the displays.
Both apply to nearly every phase although some have an emphasis on one or the other.

What follows is a kind of...

<<<< Brainstorm of what is needed? >>>>

While these groupings are roughly in time order much of this can be done at the same time as interest, money, and people are available.  Don't let the length of this list daunt you, if this project starts to take off remember we are (re)building a system that has not existed for more than 50 years!

Here goes.
 
Identify Team members
  HPMTC?
    KJ, Ken, ?
  MTC?
  Museums?
  VSA?
  Others

Data collection
  Identify museums and contacts
  Reach out to contacts about project
  Increase contacts for Alberta-MTC groups.io

Proof of Concept for connectivity
  MorseKOB interfaces
    RaspberryPi interfaces
      Reach out to LandlineMorse and MoresKOB group members
    Laptop interfaces
      As above plus Chip Morgan's Elk Creek Enterprises
  KOBserver structure
    Wire nomenclature
    Private Wires
    Procedures
      Event operations
      Demo operations
    Test using an interface from HP to AlbertaMTCwire  
  Laptop turnkey design
  RaspberryPi turnkey design

Funding
  Determine costs for:
    Interfaces
    Travel
    Domain/Hosting
  Estimate timing
    POC
    Initial setups
    Roll out
    Expansion
  Grant Applications
    Heritage Alberta (by Feb 2023)
    Alberta Museums Association
    CN/CP?
    Others
  Publicity
    Dots and Dashes
    HP?
    MTC
    Railway groups
    Others?    

Administration
  Alberta MTC
    Committee
    Society?
  KOBserver
    Hosting
    Wire-chief group
    Open Key Problem
      Hardware failure
      Operator error
      Call out
    Segmenting wires
      By org
      By region
    Planned system wide events
      Railway Days
      Festivals
      DOY
      Field Days
    General connections
      Private Wires
      Through wires
      Demo wires
  Interface Mfg
    Commercial or Hobbyists    
  Training
    Practices
    Docent training
      Package for each installation
      Support line/group      
    
Implementation
  Guinea Pigs (HP + ? )
  Expansion
    Incremental based on funding or...
      Big Bang!
        If we are going to go go big!
    Beyond Alberta
    Beyond Canada

Documentation
  Website
  Mail list
  Training/Practice Resources  


Phew!
I will concentrate on each of the main sections as I do some more thinking on all this.
As always comments, suggestions, and expressions of interest, or brickbats, welcome :-)
73
Ciao
KJ