Paper Tape!

 "Electronic Computers Improve Management Control" UCLA 1957

These readers were mechanically very similar to the reel-to-reel decks that read and recorded to magnetic tape. But their history os so different. While punch cards and paper tape date back arguably to the work of Basile Bouchon 1725 the actual use of  paper tape is more recent. While Herman Hollerith was experimenting with the godfather of machine-read punch cards in 1889 he briefly experimented with paper tape before settling on punched cards. He described both media in his patent US395781, but there was prior art.. I'll get back to that in a moment.

It's hard to imagine now, but punched cards were used into the 1980 not because they were good, but because they were cheap. The UNITYPER, an input device for the UNIVAC I computer introduced magnetic tape for data entry way back in 1953.  During the 1960s, the punched card diminished in popularity but wasn't really extinguished until the advent of the floppy disc.

Paper tape had a  parallel history to punch cards. Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated in 1801 a chain of punched cards used to control a loom. While this was clearly is derived from the work of Bouchon, it was his assistant Jean Baptiste Falcon who (apocryphally) steered his work toward punched cards. Jacques Vaucanson had experimented with them as well, with working models as early as 1745, but for his trouble he was only pelted with stones.

Paper Tape Processing

For the most part paper tape is just one long continuous punched card.We are familiar with punched tape being fed to teletypes, and seeing it as the archaic output media of stock tickers and even telegrams. Binary transmitted data to paper tape dates to at least 1846 when it was used by Alexander Bain.  the first real commercial paper tape probably dates to 1937 with the The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), also called the Harvard Mark I , which was used in WWII. The Mark I read its instructions from a 24-row punched paper tape. Later standardized tapes had 6, 7 and 8 rows. While most telegraph hardware of the day read Baudot, the ASCC did not.

The Screwtape Fascimilie Broadcasts

Note the variation on the Quick Brown Fox line above. That exact sentence was the first message sent on the Moscow–Washington hotline in 1963. It was sent by "secure" fax over land line, two decades after the death of facsimile broadcasts. More here.

It was imagined in the 1930s as a tool to communicate stock quotations, a news service, aircraft communications and as a home news service. I debate whether this was a gamble a farce or charity. R.C.A. invested a huge amount of money, time, and research into this technology in the middle of the great depression— an era when it was least likely to succeed commercially. It eventually produced a functional system which while commercially unfeasible, at least produced patentable technology that was later used in early television.

The technology of image transmission begins with Alexander Bain in 1842.  It was almost another 100 years before they got even close to a commercial service. In 1935 RCA was performing long-distance tests of facsimile transmissions up to 375 miles out from their transmitter in Rocky Point, NY (Long Island.) Yes that's approximately from New Haven, CT to Pittsburgh, PA. the AM transmissions worked best in the daytime due to multi-path interference effecting their signal on 38.6 Mc/s.  Portable receivers were installed in an automobile for continuous mobile testing. 

In 1936 the moved onto courting the airlines. A test was set up with 6 sets of receiving equipment for American Airlines hubs in Newark and Chicago. A 1Kw transmitter w2as set up on 10190 kc but testing ended after only 2 weeks because of interference from another unnamed station on the same frequency. The system was tested again with Western Airlines in Chicago and Kansas City on 2710, 4110, 6510 and 8015 kc. Tests again had difficulty with multi-path, and ignition noise. A further test in 1936 with Eastern Airlines in Miami and Atlanta was plagued by echo effects.

Enter the government. The Bureau of Air Commerce (established 1934) was excited about the idea and wanted to transmit weather reports on UHF between all airports.  Test equipment was installed in Maryland at Silver Hill and Sparrows Point on 61 and 65 mc. It was somewhat more of a success. The equipment was moved to Reading and Harrisburg for a test on 1674 kc and 190 kc in use by the state police. 

Later test tried to send weather maps to ships at sea, transmit newspapers to homes and even less plausible schemes. In the end it proved to be a solution looking for a problem.  The Bureau of Air Commerce was split into the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) which collectively lost interest. RCA saw quickly that television was the future and wisely changed strategy.

Competing Telegraphs

It wasn't much after Samuel Morse invented the first electrical telegraph in 1837 that competing systems first began to appear. But the first recorded instance of the transmission of an electrical signal across wire was patented in London in 1750 by Benjamin Franklin. Yes, that Ben Franklin. He just detonated a blasting cap there was no message per se but the concept is similar. Another early experiment was in 1804 by Francisco Salva Campillo. He used multiple wires to represent letters in signals conveyed over a distance and the signal was received with each wires immersed in a separate glass tube of acid. The current would create bubbles which would indicate the letter. In 1809 German inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmering re-worked the Campillo design so the signal could travel over a mile.

These do all sound ridiculous and impractical configurations, but the point is that the Morse system won out because it was the first practical system. he didn't invent it in a void.  That is evidenced by the fact that Prof. Charles Wheatstone, Charles T. Jackson  and David Alder all "invented" the telegraph around the same date.  Only a few years before the Morse system debuted, Carl Friedrich Gauss showed off a semi-practical electrical telegraph. He and and Wilhelm Weber built connected the Gottingen Observatory and the Institute of Physics; a distance of about half a mile.

Their prototype consisted of a coil which could be moved up and down over the ends of two magnetic bars. This motion generated an induction current that was transmitted through two wires to a galvanometer. They could also toggle the direction of the current. Using positive and negative states they encoded the alphabet in binary code. In 1832  Pavel Shilling revised an 8-wire model down to two. It was tested in Russia over a distance of 3 miles. The British government was interested in buying the design. Had Morse not had his own breakthroughs, either of these could have been a usable systems.

But what about afterwards?  The early success of the Morse system brought out as many imitators as innovators as money often does. Morse's patents were often licensed.. though sometimes not hence the lawsuits. Morse himself failed to credit Vail for the electromagnets in his model and that too was a point of legal contention. The first Morse-Vail telegraphers marked down code with pen and paper to be interpreted visually. It was only later that engineers realized they could just interpret the sound alone. As telegraph networks were built, some companies used a printing telegraph.

The first of these was developed by Mr. Royal E. House. His printers used paper tape not unlike early stock tickers. In 1846 a Scottish scientist, Alexander Bain, sped up the Morse system with a paper tape soaked in a mixture of ammonium nitrate and potassium ferrocyanide, which gave a blue mark when zapped with the current. But this was too fast so he re-engineered it as punched paper. His unit managed a top speed of 282 words in under a minute. This was more than 4x the speed of Morse's telegraph. Morse sued him of course claiming ownership of the paper tape idea. In 1848 Friedrich Clemens Gerke revised the original Morse code into a binary arrangement of dots and dashes. Sort of reminds me of VHS and Betamax.