Show typesetting BY TELEGRAPH an interesting discussion took place at a meeting of the institution of electrical engineers in london recently when donald murray read a paper on the murray automatic high speed page printing telegraph s the ap which employs the shortest telegraphic alphabet and therefore alie quickest was seen in during the evening the bunay system of printing by telegraphy is a great advance on other methods and it has been used by the british with great advantage the german has been giving it 0 prolonged trial and the russian has just given an order for the apparatus by of the murray apparatus which Is tar too complicated a machine to the uninitiated to be described in a non technical article telegrams are printed at the receiving station and where necessary the apparatus can bo attached to a linotype machine and set up type without human aid at the same time one great advantage of typesetting system is that the compositor can make corrections as the apo Is being set up all that can be about automatic typesetting by telegraph is that it la a possibility of the future and that if it Is done at all it will haie to bo done on alie linea of the murray ap pai atus because the murray system alone la practical both from the new paper aej from the telegraphic point of view when a message arrives at the receiving station it is represented by a number of boles punched in the type which operates special keys on the typewriter pulling the typewriter carriage back when necessary and working it as it by human hands in the same way a linotype machine is worked A press message is sent off in the usual way and by means 0 the murray apparatus it Is immediately set in type at the olner end any person says mr murray who has had occasion to examine the records of patents connected with telegraphy le must have been astonished at the number of printing telegraphs invented during the past sixty years in the united stales alone over printing telegraph patents have been issued since the invention of the electric telegraph in hardly any other field of human endeavor has so much labor resulted in so little return there are many reasons for this want of success but they are all based on the extreme complexity of the conditions to be fulfilled and the absence of any technical literature explaining what these conditions are with one or two exceptions telegraph engineers realizing the difficulties of the subject have left it alone and printing aels graph inventors have in most cases been outsiders the complexities cul in the printing telegraph because in that case the problem is to sei type ut a distance the type may be fixed on the cir cum terence of a wheel or may exist as separate type on the ends of type bais as in mot typewriters or as loose type in a typesetting machine but in all cases the problem is to set type that is to say to bring a type to a particular printing point in the shortest time and in the caad of the printing telegraph to that at a distance over a single telegraph wire it may be pointed out in passing that all systems from the key upward are printing telegraphs more or less developed and that a completely developed telegraph system must ba a printing telegraph telegraphy is one of the few branches of human activity in which the tendency to substitute machinery for human skill has not yet made much progress but the advantages to be gained are considerable and there is every indication that the era or fully developed machine telegraphy has now arrived |