Birmingham age-herald., 1895-04-14
SHORTHAND LIGHTNING.

The operator was playing the Worlds March," He caught the refrain from the fife and hammered it on the drum.
 To drop the figure, he was copying the press report on the typewriter. As listened to the click of the sounder and the rat-tat of the keys, I wondered how many people in Birmingham-or anywhere else, for that matter-had the slightest appreciation of the difficulty of his task.
 He was writing out telegraph short hand.
 And, like Charles Reade's hero, he car ried his notebook on his shoulders There are telegraph operators and tele- graph operators, just as there Is silk and silk. The ham" at the lonely way station, who gets down an occasional train order and has to repeat it to the dispatcher for 70. K.,' is entered appren- tice in the electrical brotherhood. The postmaster is the report" man, with the Phillips code on the tips of his fingers.
 This code Is a time-saver and nerve wrecker of the first order. It was devised to enable the United Press to handle the thousands upon thousands of words which it nightly distributes to the papers of it's service. In use only about seven years, it has more than doubled the efficiency of the service. Incidentally 1t has put much extra work upon the re cording angel.
 It is stenography applied to telegraphy The system in brief consists in the con traction of all familiar words by the elision of vowels "Adt." for instance, is amendment" The hard working words, the vertabrae of the language, are represented by arbitraries. In com parison with them the cabalistic sky rockets which drove Dickens to the, are some: "Z," from which;" O." "on the" ''f.'' Of the;" I'd" 'in the;" "4s'- ''where;'' .5," that the;'' '7" that isS'y
 In addition the more frequent phrases are skeletonized to the limit of safety. "Scotus'' is supreme court of the United States" "potus," president of the United States;' pod" postofflce de- partment;' ;'' "ogt," lon the ground that;P rot report of the," and so on to ex7 asperation.
 Phillips United Press code in use on the Southern Associated Press circuits: TT Ann spirit as K cid, cotemt fo ti' halowg infs. Inded, it sems to bv tt ti cam halow bt can ony dsy N mny ys ago Lafayette Pic WIS l f ms imposg patricn qurs N. r."
 The translation: "The American spirit, as 1t is called, has a contempt for the time-hallowing influences. Inded, it seems to believe that time cannot hallow but can only destroy. Not many years ago Lafayette Place was one of the most imposing patrician quarters of New York"
 Now remember that the operator not only has to receive and translate this jargon, but must write it out on the ma chine al a speed varying from sixty-ffve to ninety words a minute. That is an ardu- ous task under the most favorable condi- tions, which do not always obtain. The sender may slur his words until a malig- nant "b-r-r-r" stands for long phrase Atmospheric disturbances may affect the wires. Reporters and visitors may hold lusty-toned levee right around him. Nevertheless the operator is expected to "get 1t all. no matter if the dispatch is treasury item, bristling with figures: a legal decision, with intricate and inter- minable meanderngs, or an account of a battle in the hills of India or on the plains of China.
 How well he succeeds one can tell by reading the same dispatches in the papers of the service. In most in- stances they are verbatim ct literatim although they have passed through the hands of different (and indiferent) printers in dozen composing rooms.
 The Age-Herald is fortunate in the possession~of a cracker-jack operator His copy" is almost faultless, even in the minor requirements of spelling and punctuation. MT. John w. Hust has been in the business for nearly thirty- five years, ten of which he was the Cou- rier-JournaPs report man.
 Did I ever tell you," said Jack to me the other evening, "how a plug operator at Osgood, Ind. saved Aurora, Ind, during Morgans big raid? Morgan came into Osgood and captured the op- erator Then Ellsworth, Morgan's tel egrapher, who was a first class man. wrote a beautiful hand, as we say, sat down and asked Aurora if there were any troops in that vicinity. Now, this Osgood operator among other short comings. could not make a D. which. you know, is five dots, he always put ting in six or eight. Ellsworth was not aware of this, and when John H. Long. station agent at Aurora, received the dispatch he knew at once that another hand was at the key and suspecting that it was Ellsworth. replied: Yes; town full of infantry and cavalry, and gunboats flying up and down the Ohio river.' Ellsworth must have communicated this intelligence to Morgan, for the great raider made a detour, and Aurora es- capped an unpleasant experience. I do not remember to have seen this in print. By the way, John H. Long is a brother in-law of Superintendent Frazier of the Alabama Great Southern, whose head quarters are in this city.
 Almost as exacting as the "code of honah isn't it?
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