“U Tr?”: Abbreviations Used by Early-20th-Century Telegraph Operators | Hacker News Reader

“U Tr?”: Abbreviations Used by Early-20th-Century Telegraph Operators

slate.com

54 pointsdnetesn12 comments

There's a charming book about a long-distance relationship between telegraph operators called Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer. The writing itself isn't anything special, but it is remarkably prescient.

Here's a particularly insightful quotation:

> ... we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future!

Note that this was published in 1879!

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_... [via Boing Boing]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353

The telephone had already been invented at that point, yeah? So the prediction was simply that telephones would become small and wireless. An accurate prediction, of course, but not a shocking one to venture.

Perhaps. Though I would say that we've become very used to things becoming "small and wireless" over the last several decades, so that it almost seems inevitable now, but I'm not sure that's always been the case.

In addition to the tech prediction, I'm impressed by the cultural one.

The book The Information by James Gleick introduced me to this bit of history. It's an incredible book for plenty of other reasons, including discussions of West African talking drums, Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace, and plenty of other things. Highly recommended!

Interesting to see the similarities with SMS abbreviations.

More interesting are the differences caused by the medium of Morse Code. The characters are variable length and the dashes are 3x as long as the dots. So dash-heavy letters* are more likely to be dropped. Also why you rarely see numbers: the longest letter is four symbols but every digit is five symbols. In many cases it would be faster to use roman numerals.

* 3 dashes: J O Q Y. 2 dashes: C G K M P W X Z.

Also with abbreviations and codes used by ham operators communicating via CW:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_abbreviations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code

It's strange they never directly tell you what "U Tr?" means.

The table they provide is backwards for decoding this, but it looks like it means: "You there?" as in "Are you there?"

Deleted comment

If you look at the attached list of telegraph abbreviations, which is alphabetized by the long form of each word, you will see that U abbreviates "you" (as we would all expect) and Tr abbreviates "there." Are you there?

This linked article is also well worth reading: http://sundaymagazine.org/2010/08/from-1890-the-first-text-m...

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