Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1880-09-24
Telegraphing.
THE RECENT HOUSE IMPROVEMENTS.

THE RECENT HOUSE IMPROVEMENTS
Royal E. House has made improve
ments which are said to be the per-
fection OF the old House ivory-keyed,
automatic instrument of 80 years ago,
by which $50 TO 300 words minute can
be transmitted, received and permanent
ly recorded. Mr.. House is now an old
man, but seems to have lost none of his
energy or his inventive power. The
present improvements, of which somuch
is promised, are the result of 10 years of
unremitting labor. In brief, it is in
tended by this invention to make cams,
cogs, levers and electricity to do the
work of brains, hands and experience;
to send messages with the enormous rap
idity of mechanism; to have them re-
ceived and recorded automatically and
without the necessary presence of an op-
orator; to make money for the capital
lied companies and to save it to indi-
viduals. If successful, it is the cheap
postal telegraph system in a nutshell.
The inventor calculates that messages
can be sent by the new system at some-
thing less than one-tenth the cost by the
present improved Morse system, allow
ing for power, machinery, batteries, paper
and the salaries of operators and other
employees. There are, it appears, four
machines, or instruments, which consti-
tute the system. Each one of them
would be useless without the other. The
first is built on the general principle of
the type-writing machine, but instead of
printing characters cuts slips of greater
or less length in an interminable strip of
hard and stiff MANILA paper, with point
ed knives, which are raised alternately
through the lower and upper edges of
the paper by a system of levers worked
by series of brass keys, the strip of
paper passing from wheel through a
narrow brass galley and under constant
pressure over fine little slots through
which the knives work. Foot, hand,
water or steam power may be used in
running the machine, and an expert op-
orator can strike from $50 to 200 letters
per minute. The length of the slit in.
dicates the letter to small fraction of
an inch. This strip of paper, whose
marks are not those of a punch, but cut
slits in a rapidly moving strip, is then
placed in machine connected with
battery, and moves quickly through it.
Two constantly revolving wheels with
sharp, but not keen, edges, fall readily
into the slits-upper and lower alternate
ly-of the paper, and thereby make an
electrical connection with arecsiving in
strument at another office, with set of
knives similar to those in which the
original slip is placed. The knives in the
second machine cut Sits of length cor
responding to those in the original. and
can be read by an expert, although they
can be printed in the fourth machine
with such rapidity as to make handwrit-
ing comparatively tedious and useless.
This last instrument points on somewhat
the same principle as the gold and stock
automatic telegraph, but the letters are
printed from the cut slip without any
other interference than that of the power
by which the machine is run. These
messages record themselves, and the
presence or absence of an operator at the
receiving end is of no consequence
They can be sent with all the rapidity of
which porfoot ,aA eehsuuipIiI 10 capable, anu
will, it is claimed, average 200 to $50
words per minute, or approximate l5,-
900 words per hour of constant work.
All delay will be in the preparing instru-
ments, and the work then can be accom-
plished by operators at such times as the
wires are occupied from other stations.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of
the system and the one which will strike
operators and electricians as the most
improbable is the simplest. 1t is that
all messages can be sent to any particu
lar station, and to no other, and without
being heard or repeated at any other.
The "call" is so arranged in its automat-
ic way that, while the machinery is in
movement in every office, the knife-like
wheel only fills the call Sits on the tape
in the office for which it is intended, CIV
ing an automatic reply, and the similar
ly-moving wheels in every other office
failing to fit the Sits, have no impress