4 ms·

Was the message sent in norwegian from the US? In that case, depending on the actual infrastructure it had to travel through, it would have been transcribed at

Was the message sent in norwegian from the US? In that case, depending on the actual infrastructure it had to travel through, it would have been transcribed at least once, probably more than once, by operators that did not know norwegian, and thus had no intuition for where the spaces went.

lb1lf 9y ago
Yup - it was sent in Norwegian from the US. However, it was sent as late as 1993, so I would assume (without having any expertise on that kind of thing!) that 'sending a telegram' simply meant that upon you filling in the required forms, someone typed the text on a terminal or even in an application on a general-purpose computer before the text magically appeared in Norway, to be printed and hand-carried to your home, a very cumbersome solution to the last mile problem. :) (Now I am curious; I'll be off to Google later tonight - just when did the telegram service stop relying on actual telegraphy?)
- mseebach 9y ago
  The backing technology would probably have been telex. This seems to have superseded morse-telegraphs some time in the 1960s, and the US telegram office (Western Union), if they had a connection, should have been able to telex directly to your local Norwegian post office. Completely wild and unqualified guess: Western Union probably did not run their US operations over telex in 1993, they probably had some 80s-era green-screen mainframe system, which did not connect to the world wide telex network (because telegrams, especially international ones, were a microscopic part of traffic -- anyone with any kind of significant international traffic would have their own telex-links, or be on the phone, fax and/or email by then). So the operator would have typed the message (from a hand-written form, the customer would probably not have had hands-on-keyboard) into this system (first transcription), addressed to some central office in charge of sending world wide telegrams. The office would have telex, but not integrated, so they'd print out the message and re-type it on the telex (second transcription), sent directly to your local post office. There, they would take the message directly from the telex and deliver it to you (so no transcription on the Norwegian end, at which point the spacing would have been fixed).
  - ghaff 9y ago
    In the early 1980s, the oil drilling company I worked for still used Telex extensively to communicate with our various offices around the world. The procedure was that you'd fill out a form by hand and stick it in inter-office mail for delivery to our communications center in the building. In about a day, you'd get back the teletype response.
    - mseebach 9y ago
      My mother was working in a hotel booking office in the 70s, and they routinely communicated with travel agents around the world by telex. It was a really impressively comprehensive network, but largely invisible to "regular" people.

lb1lf 9y ago

Yup - it was sent in Norwegian from the US. However, it was sent as late as 1993, so I would assume (without having any expertise on that kind of thing!) that 'sending a telegram' simply meant that upon you filling in the required forms, someone typed the text on a terminal or even in an application on a general-purpose computer before the text magically appeared in Norway, to be printed and hand-carried to your home, a very cumbersome solution to the last mile problem. :) (Now I am curious; I'll be off to Google later tonight - just when did the telegram service stop relying on actual telegraphy?)

mseebach 9y ago
The backing technology would probably have been telex. This seems to have superseded morse-telegraphs some time in the 1960s, and the US telegram office (Western Union), if they had a connection, should have been able to telex directly to your local Norwegian post office. Completely wild and unqualified guess: Western Union probably did not run their US operations over telex in 1993, they probably had some 80s-era green-screen mainframe system, which did not connect to the world wide telex network (because telegrams, especially international ones, were a microscopic part of traffic -- anyone with any kind of significant international traffic would have their own telex-links, or be on the phone, fax and/or email by then). So the operator would have typed the message (from a hand-written form, the customer would probably not have had hands-on-keyboard) into this system (first transcription), addressed to some central office in charge of sending world wide telegrams. The office would have telex, but not integrated, so they'd print out the message and re-type it on the telex (second transcription), sent directly to your local post office. There, they would take the message directly from the telex and deliver it to you (so no transcription on the Norwegian end, at which point the spacing would have been fixed).
- ghaff 9y ago
  In the early 1980s, the oil drilling company I worked for still used Telex extensively to communicate with our various offices around the world. The procedure was that you'd fill out a form by hand and stick it in inter-office mail for delivery to our communications center in the building. In about a day, you'd get back the teletype response.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    My mother was working in a hotel booking office in the 70s, and they routinely communicated with travel agents around the world by telex. It was a really impressively comprehensive network, but largely invisible to "regular" people.