The Telegraphone and the Lusitania
Another of Valdemar Poulsen's inventions that figured in the history of the Sayville Telefunken station was the Telegraphone, an electromechanical device intended to make radio communications more efficient. In so doing, an element of secrecy was created, and the suspicions it caused became one of the many "little things" that eventually brought the United States into World War I. Unlike many other concepts in radio, the Telegraphone was strictly a product of the twentieth century. Its origins were in the search for better ways to detect radio signals. Since human senses do not directly respond to radio waves, radio communications would not be possible without some means of changing the waves into something we can hear, see, or feel. This was extremely difficult before vacuum tubes and transistors existed because just a few miles away from a transmitting station, radio waves usually spread out so far that less than a millionth part of the station's power can be collected by a receiving antenna. Consequently, a great deal of research and experimental work went into making weak signals audible or visible by electromechanical and chemical means in the early days of wireless.
One of the most successful of these methods, invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1902, was the magnetic detector. It consisted of a short loop of steel wire on pulleys that were turned by a wind-up mechanism. The wire first passed between the poles of a permanent magnet, which left it with a weak but uniform residual magnetism. Next, the wire went through a coil that was connected to a tuner. If a radio signal was coming in, the coil would demagnetize the wire in step with the signal. Since almost all stations then were using spark transmitters which sent waves out that repeated at audible rates, the wire retained some of the tone of the transmitter, which would be picked up for the operator's headphones by another coil. The wire then looped back to the permanent magnet, which erased the previous signals and prepared it for another pass through the coils. Magnetic detectors were widely used in Marconi's shipboard and land stations for about a dozen years. Some may recall that in the four-star 1958 British film, "A Night To remember," a historically accurate dramatization of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the wireless operator on the nearby Californian jokes with another crewmember about "winding the detector." It was a task he tragically decided not to bother with before going off duty that night. Marconi's magnetic detector was an ingenious way to hear radio signals, but he apparently did not realize that it had even more possibilities. Others saw that if reels of wire were used instead of a loop, the signals would be retained. As early as 1904, such devices were fitted with telephone mouthpieces and earphones for use as dictating machines. What Poulsen recognized was that by varying the speed of the drive, a great improvement in the message-carrying capacity of radio stations could be made. Using punched paper tape and mechanical senders, radio stations could transmit code at speeds up to about 200 words per minute, far too fast for people to copy, but which would be recorded on wire. Operators could then take the wires to their desks and decode them by playing them back at speeds of 30 to 40 words per minute. With this invention, which Poulsen called the "Telegraphone," radio stations could handle many more messages in a given amount of time with their existing equipment and frequencies. As a side benefit, casual listeners would be unable to eavesdrop on the sped-up messages, enhancing the security of communications.
As promising as the Telegraphone seemed, it did not gain much popularity. The reason was that as the wire was slowed down, the signals lost amplitude and their pitch lowered. Unless conditions were perfect, the message could become inaudible before the wire was slowed down enough to decode. Competing systems used ink recorders in receiving stations that marked the high speed code onto paper tapes. They did not have this problem since they did not require any mechanical devices to read the tapes back. One of the matters brought to Lee DeForest's attention during his stay at Federal Telegraph in Palo Alto, California in 1912 was to see if his audion vacuum tubes could be used to correct the Telegraphone's deficiencies. (As was related in the previous article, Federal had been established to commercialize Poulsen's arc transmitter, and since the company stayed on friendly terms with the inventor, it was among the first to get Telegraphones to experiment with). Although DeForest and his associates were never able to satisfactorily explain or duplicate what they did, they claimed to have produced a fine musical tone with their apparatus, (which, if true, meant that they produced the first stable, controlled oscillation with vacuum tubes). The discovery was noted and then incredibly enough, forgotten about--until Edwin Howard Armstrong's regenerative oscillator and receiver circuits proved to be of great commercial value a few years later. They also managed to produce the first feeble amplification ever accomplished with tubes. It was not enough to help the Telegraphone, but it did attract sufficient interest from AT&T for DeForest to return to New York and eventually sell some of his audion patent rights to the telephone company for $50,000. With DeForest gone, and with Federal's corporate sights set on developing the radio telephone as the logical successor to the radio telegraph, it appeared that the Telegraphone was just another idea that looked good on paper but would never amount to anything. But Telefunken found the device appealing enough to fund a small company in Springfield, Massachusetts called American Telegraphone to develop and build the machines. Aside from Telefunken, American Telegraphone's only other customer appears to have been the German Admiralty. Photographs in the possession of the Friends of Wireless History on Long Island show one of the devices installed at the Sayville station.
The Telegraphone has been one of those inventions which never goes out of style; it simply keeps reappearing in other forms. By the 1930s, electronics had progressed to the point where the mechanism could be turned into a successful audio wire recorder. In the years before World War II, a number of these recorders were built and used by German radio broadcasting stations. But not many people saw the need to record much of anything in the doldrums of the Great Depression, so only a few copies of the German machines were made in other countries. They typically needed about a mile of very thin steel wire to record 10 minutes' worth of audio. From a practical standpoint this was difficult to handle, so somebody applied the same principle to a flexible steel tape which ran at a much slower speed. A few of these original tape recorders were built and used by the German government during the war. Afterwards, several American manufacturers introduced wire recorders to the consumer market. RCA's version was highly notable in that its wire was an endless loop inside a removable metal cassette. It was the common ancestor of all cassette-type audio and video recorders. But the wire recorder descendants of the Telegrahone were destined to enjoy only a brief life in the market. A Russian émigré by the name of Alexander M. Poiniatoff had seen one of the German tape recorders during the war, and he decided to develop the concept for radio broadcasting and for movie soundtrack production. With sizable investments from Bing Crosby and other Hollywood celebrities, Poiniatoff established the Ampex Corporation in Redwood City, California, and began building tape recorders that used strips of paper coated with magnetic particles. The first Ampex machines were too expensive to use outside of radio stations and recording studios, but other manufacturers soon offered consumer versions. Dissatisfied with the durability of paper, Ampex built a machine in 1952 that used a new tape based on a space-age plastic called mylar, which had been developed by the 3M Corporation. It ushered in the modern era of audio and video recording. IBM considered tape recorders for data storage in its first line of all-electronic computers in the early 1950s, but making them fast enough with the technology then available was too much of an engineering challenge. So they flattened the magnetic material onto a disk that rotated, and mounted the pickup coil above it on a moveable arm similar to a phonograph, thereby creating the first computer disk drive. Variations of this invention have been associated with computers ever since. Of course, tape found its way into computers as well, where it is used extensively for data archiving.
Unfortunately, the Telefunken versions of the Telegraphone did not enjoy such a long or prosperous life. The strange, unintelligible signals coming from Telefunken's stations aroused a great deal of suspicion and hysteria, which to some extent contributed to America's entry into World War I. An experimenter in New Jersey named Charles Adgar built his own version of a Telegraphone based on an Edison dictating machine, and accidentally discovered that when the spring wound down while playing back Telefunken transmissions, the code in them became intelligible again. In one of the messages, the phrase "Get Lucy" was reportedly heard. This was alleged to be the command that sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, then one of the newest and fastest ships in the Cunard fleet. The huge ship, which had departed from New York bound for Liverpool was hit without warning by two torpedoes from the German submarine U-39 within sight of the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. It sank within 15 minutes, causing the loss of more than 1,200 lives, many of them young Irish nurses on their way to the front after training in American schools. The sinking of the Lusitania was due to some complex issues, chief of which was that by 1915, America's "neutrality" in World War I had become debatable. The British navy had blockaded shipping to the Central powers, cutting off most trade between the U.S. and Germany. America was officially neutral and objected to this violation of its international rights, but President Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, correctly judged that the American public would not support a war with England over what were really technicalities in the complex maritime law. Attitudes in America spanned the gamut regarding the belligerent nations, their leaders, and their reasons for fighting, but nearly everybody agreed that the war was a European problem which the U.S. should stay out of. Aside from that, purchases of all types of goods by the Allied powers had tripled America's foreign trade income, more than making up for business lost to the blockade. America was enjoying a prosperity few citizens could complain about. Much to the dismay of the German ambassador, the U.S. government did nothing more than protest the uneasy status quo. In the spring of 1915, however, matters came to a head. Reasoning that an army must eat in order to march, the British started treating food as war material to be prevented from reaching German ports. Although there was no food shortage in Germany at the time, it was too much for the Germans to take. The German submarine fleet, which was then the largest and most advanced in the world, was dispatched to the Atlantic in an assault on English shipping that would hopefully draw the blockaders away. In the past, the raids on shipping carried out by both sides had caused little loss of life because passengers and crew were either taken prisoner onboard the capturing vessel or put to sea in lifeboats. But the submarines had no room for prisoners, nor even for boarding parties of sufficient size to commandeer large ships. The only serious threat they could pose was with their torpedoes, and then only if fired without warning so the target couldn't fight back or get away. The German embassy issued warnings in American newspapers by announcing that unrestricted submarine warfare would soon begin in the Atlantic, and Americans should avoid traveling on vessels bound for English ports. Not even ships belonging to neutral countries would be safe, because neutral flags had been misused in the past by the British. It was hoped that this would be sufficient to get the Americans to take action on the neutrality issue, but it was not; "Get Lucy" was indeed a message from the German ambassador in the United States to Berlin indicating that the American government still refused to change its stance, so unrestricted submarine warfare could begin. Knowing the departure and arrival times of the Lusitania and the approximate course she would be on, the captain of U-39 intercepted her, an act for which he was later decorated. After the sinking, the Germans steadfastly maintained that fair warning had been given by the newspaper notice, so those onboard the Lusitania had been traveling at their own risk. This was not acceptable to the American press or public-- particularly in light of the fact that some German newspapers published reports within a few hours of the sinking, meaning that they had advance notice of when and where the ship would be sunk. It was apparent that the attack had been planned in advance without regard for the lives that were lost. The strange, undecipherable signals coming from the Telefunken station at Sayville only heightened the hysteria. Which ship would be attacked next? German-American relations were damaged almost beyond repair, and the worldwide public outcry was so intense that the German emperor issued secret orders to his submarine commanders not to torpedo any more passenger ships unless the passengers and crew were given a chance to take to the lifeboats. The U.S. government issued a temporary order to shut the Sayville station down, and a contingent of Marines was sent to make sure the orders were obeyed. When Sayville reopened, three American naval officers were in attendance in an attempt to make sure no further clandestine messages were sent. Following the torpedoing of the British ships Arabic and Sussex, in August, 1915 and March, 1916, which forced the German emperor to publicize and enforce his ban on passenger ship attacks, relations between America and Germany appeared to be on the mend. But early in 1917, the German High Command began its final fight to the finish. Submarines sank three American merchant vessels with great loss of life on March 18, and America's time of fence-sitting came to an end.
In 1917, and again in the 1930s, radicals and socialists would claim that America's entry into the war was caused by Wall Street investors, bankers, and industrialists seeking to preserve their huge profits on the death and destruction in Europe. From reviews of President Wilson's papers, it is evident that none of these interests had any significant influence on the matter. Others have said the real problem was that the United States was not truly neutral to begin with, but this presupposes that the trade issues could have been dealt with separately from the bigger international issues of the time, which of course is not realistic. What brought the United States into World War I was a series of events, which included the Lusitania and other ship sinkings, the Zimmermann Telegram (which we will examine later), and certain posturings taken by both the English and German governments which rendered President Wilson's efforts to obtain a negotiated peace during 1916 futile. The Telefunken station at Sayville played a pivotal role in many of these events, which caused Americans to realize, for the first time since the Monroe Doctrine 94 years earlier, that if they wanted to control their own destiny instead of having it determined for them, they would have to participate in world politics and defend their rights by force when necessary. War was officially declared on April 6, 1917, but many East Coast amateur radio operators knew it was coming twelve hours earlier when they heard the Sayville station broadcasting a warning to all German ships in American harbors to avoid confiscation by raising steam and moving to international waters without delay.
Chris Bacon Vice President FLIWH, July 1996
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