page forty-three

The Wire

Forty-two rooms and nobody has ever sent anybody a message. Today's number hands a telegram in at a country post office and sends it down a line with weather on it. At your end there is a strip of paper tape, a code card and a form to write the copy on. Read it before the boy goes out.

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The inker's tape, gummed to the form. Hover to gauge a mark; click a word to ask for it again.

Gauge: hover over a mark to measure it against the sender’s dot.

Repeats left: 2
The code card

A dash is three dots long, a letter ends with a space of three dots and a word with seven. That is the book. The clerk at the far end has his own ideas.

Your copy
Wire
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The arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different office, a different clerk and a different line.

What is real here and what is not

The code, the tape, the tariff and the way a bad line and a bad fist go wrong are real. The offices, the clerks and the telegrams are the day's number.

  1. 01

    Morse, Vail and Gerke

    Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail's code of the 1840s was rewritten for the German lines by Friedrich Gerke in 1848 and settled in Vienna in 1851 as the Continental code, the one on the card. The Post Office took over Britain's private telegraph companies in 1870, and its inland offices worked in this code until the telephone and the teleprinter wound them down.

  2. 02

    The inker and the sounder

    Morse's register embossed, and later inked, the signal onto a moving strip of paper, which is what is on the form here. Operators soon found they could read faster by ear from the click of the armature, a sound when it went down and another when it came up, and the sounder replaced the tape in most offices. Both are on this page.

  3. 03

    The fist

    No two telegraphists sent alike, and operators could tell each other down the line by their fist: how long they held a dash, how much they crowded letters, how steady they were. The book asks for a dash of three dots and spaces of one, three and seven. Here the far clerk is given his own numbers, and the line breaks dashes and drops clicks of static into the spaces as it goes.

  4. 04

    The charge, and the machine

    From 1870 an inland telegram cost a shilling for twenty words with the address free; from October 1885 it was sixpence for twelve words, address included, and a halfpenny a word after. The mechanical reader is not a period machine: it ignores very short marks, sorts the rest by length into the two heaps that split them most cleanly and the spaces into three, and reads off whatever that gives. After delivery the page draws both sortings.

Forty-three rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it hands in a telegram, gives the clerk who sends it a hand of his own, puts weather on the line and leaves you the tape.