[GreenKeys] a couple of scanned articles

[gil smith]

Hi guys:

I finally got a flat-bed scanner hooked up.  I had tried scanning some
things through a sheet-feed unit, but the scans were slow and poor.  This
one seems to work better.

I scanned a couple of articles I came across, that I think you folks might
find interesting.  I just uploaded them to my web site, but there are no
links from the main site yet (I need to spend some time on this site).  But
you can access the files directly by clicking on the links below.  Note
that if the link wraps in your emailer, and is not totally highlighted, it
will get truncated when you click on it -- if so, try a simple cut and
paste.  

Here's how I did the scans:  I scanned each page at 300-dpi, in 8-bit
grayscale, as a tif file.  I brought the tif into photoshop, straightened
and cropped it, then reduced it to 7.5" wide to provide a printer margin
for letter-size paper (resampling to keep it at 300-dpi).  Then I increased
brightness and contrast, and saved this as a master page.  These pages look
great, but they are huge (about 6.8 MB per page), so I tried saving as
jpeg, at low quality level -- this got them down to about 900K per page,
which is still pretty big, but the pictures and drawings still looked good.
 Then I tried converting the master tif from an 8-bit grayscale to a 1-bit
bitmap (with diffusion dither), and saved it as a tif with lzw compression
-- this got each page down to about 310K, and pics were still decent (and
tif format will preserve 300-dpi, unlike bmp or gif).  Then I used Acrobat
to combine the pages into a single pdf file.  Seems ok, but if someone has
suggestions, let me know.


"A New Page-Printing Telegraph," is from three February 1901 issues of
Electrical Review (ER was a weekly trade mag).  It is a great description
of the Murray teleprinter system, and compares throughput to Morse
signalling.  Paper tape was punched on a keyboard perforator -- the holes
were lengthwise on (not across) the tape, at 1/2" per char.  The
transmitter was a modified Wheatstone, and the receiver used some vibrator
gizmo driving a typewriter mechanism.  Alphabets for Murray, Baudot (the
original, I presume), and Morse are shown.  There are also a lot of little
historical tidbits, especially on the first page.   (1.7M)
http://www.vauxelectronics.com/gil/tty/docs/electrical-review-feb-1901-murra
y-teleprinter-article.pdf


"The Teletypesetter, A New Robot," is from the Dec 22, 1928 Literary
Digest's Science and Invention column.  The article is fluff, but the pics
are nice (I have better-quality pics available).  Anyone have an ID for any
of the machines?  (680K)
http://www.vauxelectronics.com/gil/tty/docs/literary-digest-dec-1928-teletyp
esetter-article.pdf

gil




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