John Payson wrote:
> One story I read somewhere, but I'd like to find a real and definitive
> source for it, was that the original purpose of the telegraph was in
> fact to produce marks on paper (the paper being moved at a constant
> speed while the solenoid controlled a pen).  Tapping the pen against the
> paper briefly would produce a dot while holding it would produce a dash.
> The idea, then, was that the recipient of a message, following its receipt,
> would then proceed to decode the dots and dashes on the paper into letters,
> numbers, and other symbols.

  Hmmm, IIRC originally I thought Edison was a telegraph operator
(before he became an inventor) & he worked on some kind of automatic
telegraph forwarding thingies as his first inventions (as telegraphs had
SHORT! ranges back then? like 5 miles?) - those used paper or something
like that, to repeat the signal?  But I thought it wasn't pen-based,
rather burn marks on paper somehow, as ball point pens didn't exist then
<G>  Fountain pens might not work well here...

  1870's/1880's patents by edison, maybe?  (I'm offline just now.)

  Mark, mwillis@Nwlink.com