Aircraft typewriters?

[John Hill]

A friend of a friend once showed me an aluminium typewriter with four rows of keys but no 'shift'. It had all capital letters, numerals and about 6 punctuation characters. It also handled a roll of paper rather than individual sheets.

He claimed they were especially made for radio operators on Pan Am Clipper boats.

Has anyone heard or seen such a thing?

(Yeah I know, typerwiters are not the most interesting artifacts to hoard :rolleyes:)

[Ogre]

Without going into too many details, the Nimrod fleet in the UK used to (still do?) fly with a teletype system connected to one of the onboard radio systems. The user interface is basically a typewriter keyboard with a roll of paper, but when you type a message it writes to the paper and transmits the information. Received messages are typed automatically to the paper. Two or more teletypes on the same frequency would communicate much like instant messaging on your mobile phone. Other large military aircraft use a similar system for passing messages/orders/reports etc.

Ogre

[John Hill]

Thanks Ogre, I am quite familiar with the teletypewriter type machines and I was at one time quite skilled in their use however the typewriter I was shown was a manual typewriter but interesting for its light weight and the fact that it was quite like what we used to call a "Signals Typewriter" which was optimised for use with Morse Code. Of course the notion that it was a relic of those golden days of the Clipper boats gave it an extra aura!

I believe the Signals Typewriters we used had very heavy cast steel frames and the finest that Mr Imperial could make!

[Opssys]

It would not surpise me if your friend wasn't correct as this would be conceptually the same as a Ocean Liner Radio room typing in morse messages to a typewriter for passing to passengers.

In the early 1980s I had the privilege of watching the Maritime Operators at BT Portishead transferring morse in their headsets onto teletype machines in real time, as most of these messages were in Shipping Company Code, what was being typed made no sense to the operator, but apparently mistakes were rare. So for a Radio Operator on a Clipper, principle would be the same and subject to reception quality, slightly easier as the message would probably be plain language.

Uppercase only Typewriters (as against Teletype) have a long history and were issued to Station Masters at GWR Stations early in the Company's History, at a guess with the purpose the resulting message could be hand carried to a telegraph office, but were also used to reply to customer complaints and letters (Sorry trivial thread drift).

Back on thread, I remember the late Jim Jordan (BUA/BCAL Radio Workshops) telling me that BUA experimented with Radio Teletype installed on the VC10s for passing Passenger Messages. I think whilst technically a success, Passengers didn't make use of the service and they were removed after a very short time.

[LTAfan]

I am a long-time reader who is at last able to offer a humble contribution to this excellent forum.

A good person to speak with would be Dr. Richard Polt of Xavier University, who is also an authority on historic typewriters and runs the popular Classic Typewriter Page (http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/index.html). He is well-connected in the typewriter collecting community and he might be able to find an answer to your question. His e-mail address is on the website. I hope that this is of some help.

For some of us, an antique typewriter is just as much a thing of beauty as a classic aircraft! :ok:

LTAfan

[John Hill]

Opssys, ah, the caps only typewriter for railways is so obvious I had not thought of it!

Incidently I have seen a photo of a telegram sent from Darwin reporting the Japanese bombing of the town in WWII. This typewriter had a very cunning font! It appears that the lower case character were so designed that they could be overtyped with their capital equivalent and still make a nice character. In that example you could see that all capitals were overtypes and I can only imagine that the morse telegraph operator copied it first in all lower case (is there a case signal in Morse? I dont think so) then went back and capitalized where required.

IIRC the US aircraft supporting Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica had radio teletypes on board in the '60s.

I used to operate morse on aeronautical circuits, point to point though never air ground, and in 1999 I saw them still using it in Pyongyang.

There were some very good coding schemes in use including the grid winds which was a series of 5 figure groups and if you typed it up properly you could go over with a pen and create a nice weather map! I tried to write software to do it as one of my first PC programming exercises but the task was really beyond me. At about the same time (1970's) I made a morse keyboard using magnetic cores and about 20 first generation ICs, it worked really well but I found it confusing to use as I could type a word then hear it going out on the transmitter and my earlier training caused my fingers to type it again!

Thanks LTAfan I will study Dr Polt's page!

[Hyperborean]

The machine sounds very similar to the teleprinters used for the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunications Network (AFTN) which is the way most flight plans and notams etc are distributed through the ATC system. Nasty noisy things in the 60's when I started. They were able to cut and read paper tape and I believe were compatible with the radio teletype. It is not so long ago that a lot of the transatlantic traffic carried radio teletype, more convenient than HF RT as anyone who has been driven deaf by it will testify.

[John Hill]

Hyperborean, yes I am familiar with the AFTN and our company supplies various components for it though the mechanical teletypewriter/Teletype machines are mostly gone we are still cometimes called upon to supply interfaces to them, but not recently though.

I was on the ground end of HF air ground channels during the 60's and early 70's and perhaps that is why I am as deaf as I am!:hmm:

[India Four Two]

[Slight thread creep]

Back in the 80s, I worked for an oil company in Jakarta and we used HF radio-teletype for communications with our field operations in North Sumatra, a distance of about 1500 km. We used directional Yagi antennas (multi-element antennas with varying element lengths, that look somewhat arrow-shaped). We had been having trouble with reception for a while and Hal, our communications guy (an ex-Bf 110 radar operator, so there is an aircraft connection), who was in Jakarta, was at a loss.

Then an engineer who had just come back from the field and obviously knew something about radios, said "Hal, shouldn't the narrow end of the antenna be pointing towards Jakarta?" Our radio operator in Sumatra had been sending his signals the long way round to get to Jakarta.:eek:

A quick re-orientation of the antenna and Hal's problems were solved. Well, not all of them. There was still the monthly delivery of a "facilitation" payment to the Telex office, to fix the Telex line which mysteriously went unservicable on the last day of every month.

[End of thread creep]

[John Hill]

IndiaFourTwo, funny thing about HF radio sometimes it would have been easier to send it the long way!

We used to hear Jeddah calling Damascus on aeronautical HF at Rarotonga in the South Pacific. We could hear both of them but they could not hear each other.

[Hyperborean]

Like John Hill my HF experience was in the S Pacific. we regularly heard traffic working down through West Africa. There was one occasion when a BCAL aircraft who had been vainly calling Bangui, Brazzaville and others finally said,"Other station on 8924 can you relay for me?" Sadly I couldn't but he did seem rather bemused to be working someone half a world away. Incidentally both our AFTN and SITA links were on HF RTTY. The french built teleprinters were just as noisy as the Creeds we had in UK. As for deafness, I think my hearing was saved when we got SSB.

[Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!]

Might it have been from an airship? I hear they were well equipped - even had Aluminum Pianos

[John Hill]

I dont think any real airships made it to NZ!

Hyperborean, you might remember that 747 (Pan Am?) crew who used to spend the long Pacific leg with his equipment tuned to amateur radio bands especially around 14210(?) where the Maritime Mobile (i.e. yachts) used to chat each day. He was a great resource when there was a SAR for an overdue yacht.

[Hyperborean]

John, I know this is thread creep and does not help in your original request, but no I don't recall the 747 crew you mention. I was in New Hebrides/Vanuatu
from 79 to 84 as an Atco. My connection with teleprinters was somewhat peripheral, mostly they were were in a room downstairs or next door although we were plagued with them in the towers of Highland and Island airfields in UK until about 10 years ago when computers took over. Certainly the keyboard and paper roll format you describe sounds like the Creed machines used in UK and also the French (Thomson I think) machines supplied in the condominium. They were rather more substantial though being steel framed not aluminium

[esa-aardvark]

Once upon a time I could have answered this for you.
In my younger days (40 years ago!) I worked with teletype
machines. I am sure that Teletype corporation did make
an airborne version of their ASR33/KSR33 maybe with a
model number like ASR28 or ASR26. Were certainly
used by the US Air Force. Might be worth checking what
was carried on board such as B-52.

regards, john

[Eagle402]

Apologies for thread creep. Whilst flying in a Cessna 402 from Malakal to Khartoum in late 70's (I think 79) we were trying to raise the notorious Khartoum Tower to advise eta but struggling due to heat haze/limited (non-pressurised) ceiling.

Imagine our amazement to hear a cut-glass British accent offering to relay our call. It was a B.A. Concorde flight out of (iirc) Dar es Salaam on one of the experimental routes. As quick as a flash they had relayed and advised that Khartoum were aware (a result in itself). Made our day !

[seacue]

The Teletype (TM) ASR28 was the heavy-duty "brother" of the ASR33. Certainly not airborne. I don't know the 26.

I vaguely remember that the type of the '28 was in a rectangular box which shifted in two axis to place the correct letter under the hammer. The '33 type was on a drum which rotated. the 15/19 type was in a basket like a conventional typewriter.

[Brian Abraham]

Just reading about the Comet racer G-ACSS that made the record flight to NZ in1938 (Authur Clouston and Victor Ricketts) and see they had a typewriter installed in the rear cockpit. A long bow? Stranger things have happened.

[John Hill]

Did the Comet make it to NZ in 1938? I didnt know that though I do know it at least made it as far as Sydney.


Interesting too to hear of these other airborne keyboard devices!

[Brian Abraham]

The last historic flight by 'SS was one of its greatest. Flown by Clouston and Victor Ricketts, it took off from Gravesend on March 15th 1938, reached Sydney in 80 hours 56 minutes, crossed the Tasman Sea to Blenheim (where Clouston had learnt to fly), New Zealand, in 7½ hours, stopped overnight, then returned to Croydon on March 26th.

[Opssys]

John.
I have become increasingly interested in your friends typewriter, any chance you could get a picture and post it here?

I have looked around der web and so far nothing.

Drift into teletype machines - For reasons which now escape me, I was in contact with the ROC about year before they disbanded and they were just installing some new teletype machines, which until I thought about it seemed masochistic to say the least. then I realised they would be immune to any EMP produced by a Nuke. I never found out how they were networked, but it was an interesting example of how old style tech still had a place at that late date.