[GreenKeys] SMECC NEEDS PADS OF TELEGRAM FORMS FOR DISPLAY WU AND RCA Bot...
COURYHOUSE at aol.com
COURYHOUSE at aol.com
Fri Nov 25 23:29:55 EST 2016
OK back again - Had to get a real computer keyboard was on the road
back from a press shoot with the mayor and Santa turning on Kazillions of
lights in downtown Glendale Az tonight!
Amazing to shoot this stuff now in 4K - I almost didn't need to bring
my still photogs along with as you can pull a frame and it is
...WONDERFUL
Anyway I digress ...
According to history Bell and his associates in the very earliest of day
offered to sell the telephone patient to Western Union for... 100,000 at
first WU did not think the phone would ever really become
something.. (needless to day some executive in WU wen on to wake up each morning
and kick himself in his own ass... very hard!)
Here is a little bit here but there is a lot out on the net on this -
google is full.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/aug/06/bellvwestern
What is interesting to read if you like the early company histories are
the court cases for patient infringement Bell brought against many.
When the Franklin Library broke up its stacks ( hope they microfilmed
some of this stuff) SMECC ( or SMEC as it was known in those early years)
was fortunate to purchase a lot of these bound court case proceedings.. not
only fascinating... but when you read the deposition of some these
folks it is THEM talking! ( or course they may be completely lying - but
nevertheless it is them!).
Reading Watson's long deposition not only helped when were constructing
a replica of the instrument They used for the first long 2 way
conversation which was accomplished between Boston and Cambrigeport but also shed
light had the gallows type receiver been used in a quieter environment
instead of on the floor of the Charles Williams Electrical work's machine
shot where Bell had is work area above... this gallows receiver /
microphone thingis would have gotten more respect if tested in a quieter
area at that end.
We have a shelf of these things.... and I am certain not all the suits
even! I need to see if these and any that we might me missing are
online somewhere.
Forward into such a not-so-distant past ... history of computer
companies are interesting to read also.
Currently I am plowing though a book titled The NeXT Best Thing
about Steve Jobs and the ill fated NeXT computer... Funny things happen
simultaneously sometimes... We had dragged our Next out to start restoring
it for a display an happed to go by the book sale table at the library and
there was The NeXT Best Thing !
A lot of people took a bath on the NeXT, Ross Perot, Canon, Stanford and
others..
I do remember seeing a CCARMA Music center when John R. Pierce took me
though there to show me what he was involved in there were lots of NeXT
computers. John in hiss final years after Bell labs and Cal Tech was
processor Emeritus of Electronic Music at Stanford.
Any way interesting book... If you thought Jobs could act bizarrely at
Apple you will be entertained by some of that happens in this chapter
in his life.
And forks thanks again for the heads up on that Western Union
Book... gotta get one!
Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org)
In a message dated 11/25/2016 8:48:47 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
greenkeys at mailman.qth.net writes:
The growth of all these communications companies is fascinating and
interesting to study the rivalries between them! more to follow..... I need a
real keyboard.... ed#
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
____________________________________
On Friday, November 25, 2016 Richard Knoppow <1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com>
wrote:
This sounds like a book worth having. I have a book on W.U. it
points out that W.U. was the first truly national company. People thin,
the railroads were the first large merged companies but none covered
more than a region while W.U. covered the entire country. The book also
points out that a lot of the financial maneuvering to get control of
W.U. was really to obtain control of railroads. W.U. was never a
profitable as people think. I also have somewhere a business history of
AT&T. It points out that at any time in its existence an investment in
AT&T would have lost money in comparison to the average of industrial
stocks on the NYSE. The reason was the status as a regulated public
utility and the capital intensity brought about by the need for constant
maintenance and expansion. (Intensity is not the right word but I am
drawing a blank on it). I think W.U. must have faced something similar
plus it also had a large payroll.
Its also interesting to look at transoceanic cable companies. Both
W.U. and ITT were principles in this endeavor with many cables. I think
its also interesting that successful voice cable over transoceanic
distances came very late. Of course now, with optical fiber cables
provide enormous bandwidth and are more reliable than satellite.
It is my understanding that W.U. survived for a long time because a
telegram was cheaper than a long distance phone call. I don't have
numbers for this but think it was probably true up through the 1940s.
On 11/25/2016 6:15 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Nov 2016, Richard Knoppow wrote:
>
>> My memory of telegrams is that the forms were a sort of tanish
>> yellow. Very old memory.
>> While wire telegraph work is being discussed rather than radio the
>> "other" radio service, MacKay seems not to have been mentioned. MacKay
>> was associated with Postal Telegraph and later W.U.
>>
> There's a book "The Telegraph: a History of Morse's Invention and its
> Predecessors in the United States" by Lewis Coe. I consider this a
> complement to "The Story of Telecommunications" by George Oslin. Oslin
> writes from a Western Union standpoint - he was their P.R. man for many
> years - and Coe seems to be writing from a Postal viewpoint. There
> are a lot of amusing stories in both books. He tells of the elder
> Mackay who made a fortune in the Comstock Lode and married an opera
> singer there. Pretty soon she decided Virginia City was too small for
> her and moved to Paris. Mr. Mackay was running his business from New
> York and traveling to Paris to be with his wife. In Paris he encountered
> a newspaper man, Bennett, who was there running his paper remotely by
> cablegrams. Bennett was at odds with Jay Gould, who had control of
> Western Union and the cable business, so he suggested that Mackay should
> lay a cable to complete with Gould. Mackay did so, but then had trouble
> getting messages to and from his cables via W.U., so he started Postal
> Telegraph. Jay Gould said Mackay was one man he could never beat because
> Mackay could at any time just dig up another million dollars in his
silver
> mines.
>
> Of course that time was just about the peak for the telegraph business,
> which went downhill from then on. The nation couldn't even support one
> telegraph company, let alone two. Postal Telegraph came to be owned by
> ITT, and it was long felt by W.U. that ITT had a favored position with
> the U.S. government. At first the government would not allow the two
> companies to merge, but in 1943 Postal was in suce dire straits that
> Congress brought about a shotgun wedding of the two. W.U. was the
> surviving company but assumed some heavy burdens in the form of Postal's
> debt and employees and their pension obligations. W.U. did get some
> good people out of the deal though, including engineer Gilbert Vernam
> and executive Walter Marshall, who became President of W.U.
>
--
Richard Knoppow
1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
WB6KBL
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