0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) (02/21/91)
In response to a thread about early submarine telegraph cables, 99700000 <haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu> writes: > With all due credit to WU, and hey did some fine engineering, the > AT&T effort was a lot more extensive. WU's undersea amplifier was > a single amplifier located not too far offshore, primarily to get > some gain over the noise from all the other cables passing nearby. > AT&T had to provide a whole string of amplifiers the entire length > of the cable. No doubt that AT&t's work represented a leap in the technology, but AT&T made no effort to credit the place that gave them a launching pad for it. I once met an old ITT submarine cable engineer and one of his projects was to build a locating loop and amplifier that could hang on several miles of cable over the side of a ship to listen for the broken end of a cable one the ocean floor. He achieved more than 100 dB of gain in a pressure-tight box with triode tubes ... ten of them down there! Solid-state engineers are probably not impressed, but those readers who understand hollow-state electronics will be suitably impressed. The old telegraphers were truly heroes of mega- lithic telecom; people who have been lost in the mists of telephone history. I regard as a lot more than simply "fine engineering." It was pioneering. Let's not trivialize their contributions. Then, Gabe Wiener <gabe@sirius.ctr.columbia.edu> poses the question: >... what is WU up to these days? And our Moderator gave a pretty good rundown, except I'm not too sure about how WUTCo is going to separate their TWX/Telex domestic operations from Easylink, because they ahd in fact made many of the old TWX and Telex machines points on the Easylink network with aliases. From what I perceive about WUTCo, having interfaced and watched them for many years, they are likely to hae made a deal in which AT&t does the switching and transmission for them, winding up paying out so much they will lose what's left of their now-ragged shirt on that. WUTCo just seems to have had a financial death wish since about 1925, when they borrowed so much they never were able to pay off their debt despite repeated concessions, and literal handouts from the Feds. One could always sense in WUTCo's approach to the Feds, in both regulatory and contract matters, a choir singing, "There'll Always be a WUTCo," (to the tune of "There'll always be an England.") WUTCo liked to file FCC pleadings that referred to AT&T as "the Telephone company," while they called themselves, "the Telegraph company." (Emphasis on the capital T's they really used. I think that style spoke volumes about how WUTCo saw itself ... as an institution of telecommunications the government and people of the United States would feed forever; some sort of crown jewel of American history of a class akin to the Liberty Bell. WUTCo actually got away with it for several decade, too. Meantime, their debt bomb just got bigger and bigger, while their top management fiddled away ... literally. I have plenty of personal stories for the bar after this session! Finally, Gabe ponders what with all the Fax machines, how can Telex even be a viable business today (sic)? I do maintain some contact with the good old Telex business, having pounded Baudot keyboards in about 70 nations around the globe, (pity my poor PC keyboard!) and have found that Telex to and among the developed nations is in rapid decline. But, Telex actually got out there to more of the underdeveloped countries far before international telephony, to an extent that if your business is with the Third World, Telex is still the prime medium of communications. It is, however, a mixed bag, for some of the least developed never had much Telex, and fax is making strong inroads there, too. They can import fax machines cheaper than teleprinters and use their now-developing phone network. The upshot: I fear Gabe's portent of an early grave for Telex is on the mark; it just isn't dying instantly. By 2000, it probably will be gone.