Telegram for America (1956) [video]

This promotional film made for Western Union shows some very cool "high tech" equipment from before the computer age. The machines for automatically transmitting and decoding telegrams, the desktop "fax" machine for a business executive, and in particular, this very impressive automatic "store and forward" switching machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_55-A

This last one presaged many ideas which later appeared in the design for the Arpanet, and the analysis of queuing delays with the system was part of the Phd dissertation by Len Kleinrock, who helped come up with many of the ideas that contributed to the invention of the internet.

It seems like these earlier systems are not really talked about much anymore since they quickly became obsolete as a result of digital computers, but it's fascinating to think about what they could have evolved into had the transistor never been invented.

Lol I read the headline and I thought of the app. So weird because I am actually a ham radio operator and I have done morse in the past. I still do ham but I never enjoyed morse, I do a lot of digital now. I was just learning it to get the more capable license but then the requirement ended up dropped anyway.

It's funny how a mindset can change so quickly and terms can change their meaning completely.

But 1956 is a bit weird of a date for telegrams, as it was invented way before that.

I'll watch it later because it sounds interesting.

You have to guess that some of the people at the time saw that this film was also a prophecy of the end of telegrams: telephones, television, and movies existed and were improving year by year. The film itself is an example of a medium that would displace telegrams.

The video promotes how important the telegraph was to sports fans by showing summer clips from football and baseball followed by shots of the Telegraph operators; but of course sports fans would rather watch than read a telegram!

I wonder if this film was produced precisely as a “we’re still relevant!” PR strategy?

How cool is that telegram receiving car!