Here’s another more or less self-explanatory homemade telegraph set, from the pages of Popular Mechanics 90 years ago this month, June 1926. Unlike the one we featured a few weeks ago from 1916, this one relies on manufactured doorbell buzzers, and is intended to allow practice for aspiring radio operators, since the buzz of the doorbell more closely simulates the sound of a radio telegraph signal, as opposed to the clacking of the sounder of the landline telegraph shown in the earlier example. The article noted that the sound of the buzzer might be a lower pitch than desired, but explained how to increase the pitch by strategically placing a piece of paper in the buzzer.

This one can be set up either for practice at a single station, or two units can be interconnected as shown here. To receive, the other station needs to short out the key with the shorting bar shown.

The set is powered by two dry cell batteries. The article notes that if the two stations are some distance apart, such as in different houses, then a set of batteries might be necessary at each station.

In case you’re wondering, you can still find old-fashioned door bells, although they are getting harder to find.

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Ninety years ago, the January 1926 issue of Popular Mechanics showed this simple but ingenious device for practicing code. It allowed the aspiring radio operator a way to generate perfect code with a buzzer.

The board (preferably oak or ash) had a series of grooves.  At the beginning and end of each dot and dash a hole was drilled.  Copper wire was threaded up through the holes, forming a conductive path for each letter.  The other contact was slid over the letter at any desired speed, forming perfect code.

The article noted that a similar device had been used in the early days of the telegraph, presumably allowing unskilled operators to send (but not receive) messages.

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It’s generally accepted in the history of science and technology that radio couldn’t have been invented until James Clerk Maxwell came up with Maxwell’s Equations in 1865.  That theoretically underpinning of radio were verified experimentally by Heinrich Hertz in 1887.  (Hertz, it turned out, was using electromagnetic waves of about two meters in wavelength, it turns, meaning that the first intentionally generated radio waves were probably in or near the two meter amateur band.)

The prevailing wisdom, which is more or less true, is that someone like Guglielmo Marconi in the 1890’s couldn’t have come along and turned radio into a practical device without the prior work of Maxwell and Hertz.

While that statement is generally true, it ignores Dr. Mahlon Loomis, a dentist and inventor who was born in 1826 and died in 1886, the year before Hertz’s experiments.  And it appears that in 1866, he successfully communicated wirelessly between two mountains fourteen miles apart.  Unfortunately, he produced no independent witnesses to verify the claim.  And his understanding was that some layer of the sky was completing a direct-current circuit, using the atmosphere as a conductor to send the direct current.

Even though his explanation is impossible, it’s likely that he was sending and receiving radio signals.  FIrst of all, his sending mechanism appears to have included a spark gap between the aerial and ground.  And more critically, Loomis found that the system would work only if the two aerials were extended to the same length.  He surmised that they were both coming into contact with the same level of the atmosphere, through which the DC current was conducted.  But the more likely explanation is that the two antennas were both resonant to the same frequency of radio wave.

In 1872, he was issued U.S. Patent 129971 for his wireless telegraph.  And in 1873, the U.S. Congress even chartered the Loomis Wireless Telegraph Company.  Loomis was, however, never able to raise sufficient capital to make the venture a practical reality.

It’s probably true that radio pioneers such as Marconi couldn’t have succeeded without Maxwell and Hertz telling them that it was theoretically possible to send electromagnetic waves through space.  But it’s not a foregone conclusion.  Loomis shows that history could have played out the other way around:  Someone could have accidentally discovered radio (as it appears that Loomis did), and only then the physicists could be called upon to explain how it works.

Fifty years ago this month, there was an interesting article about Loomis in Popular Electronics, October 1965, written by Thomas Appleby, W3AX.  The illustration above is taken from that article.  Appleby was also the author of Mahlon Loomis, Inventor of Radio, published in 1967.

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Many hams and others will instantly recognize the picture above as being the tape from a teletypewriter machine.  The machines were capable of sending faster than operators could type, so to reduce transmission time, the message could be punched onto the paper tape shown here and fed into the machine for later transmission.  I remember such devices still in use into the 1980’s by hams using radioteletype (RTTY), and the machines invariably originated from landline telegraph systems.

And most hams who look at the image closely will immediately notice that it’s a 5-bit code, and they will probably proclaim pretty quickly that it’s Baudot, since the Baudot 5-bit code was in use for many years.

They might be surprised to learn the age of this particular tape, and they will also be surprised to learn that it’s not Baudot.  This tape is a hundred years old, shown here from the May 1915 issue of Electrical Experimenter.  The technology was relatively new at the time, and the accompanying article describes it in some detail.    The particular tape shown here came from the Associated Press, and is the beginning of a news item.  The AP New York office sent out 32,000 words a day over the wire, and this type of automation was necessary to handle the volume of news.  During the office’s busiest hours of the day (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM), three or four operators were perforating tape simultaneously so that these tapes could be fed into the machine that sent them out.  One of those operators is shown here.

And despite the similarities, the code being used in this tape is not Baudot.  It turns out that standardization didn’t take place for a few more years.  The code shown here is “Morkrum Code.”  If you look closely, you’ll see that the code for the letter A appears to be the same.  And like Baudot, it required the operator to shift from letters to characters and back again.  But the encoding is different.  If you’re interested in the history of the various codes in use, you’ll find them in an article entitled The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968 by Eric Fisher.

The code that’s undoubtedly bringing these words to your screen are the ASCII code, an 8-bit code which came into use in the early 1960’s.  But the basic idea has been around for over a century.

The tape at the top of the page, read from right to left, reads as follows:

MER PAWNEE.  PHILADELPHIA. TO THE CLYDE
S S CO. WITH MDSE PASSED IN QUA

This scrap of tape appears to have originated five years earlier, since this snippet appeared in the shipping news of the  New York Tribune on August 25, 1910, in the clipping shown below.

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