Abstract
SIR, THOMAS PURVES, engineer to the Post Office, contributes to the British Industries Number forming a supplement to the Times of November 1 an interesting article on the industries connected with telegraphy and telephony. In the earlier days of telegraphy, Great Britain was pre-eminent in the manufacture of high quality Morse and Wheatstone automatic apparatus. The very fact of the excellence of this equipment somewhat delayed the adoption of type-printing telegraphs in Great Britain, but the whole supplies of the telegraph system are now being manufactured at home. It is hoped that the establishment of the teleprinter exchange service which is being introduced by the Post Office as an adjunct to the public telephone switching system will produce a further extensive demand for these ingenious machines. Before the year 1912, when the telephone service of Great Britain was transferred to the Post Office, a large portion of the equipment was purchased from abroad. Now the proportion of foreign material purchased by the Post Office is less than one per cent of the whole. A great impetus was given to the mass production of apparatus on precision principles in 1922 by the general adoption of standardised types of automatic exchanges. This policy encouraged other nations to follow suit and export markets to several countries were opened up for automatic telephone equipment manufactured in Great Britain. The circuits and mechanisms developed for automatic exchanges opened up independent fields of application in other directions, such as the supervisory control of electrical power plant, centralised railway control and the electrical equipment of the totalisators now operating on racecourses. Telephone manufacturers were quick to take advantage of these applications.
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Telephony and Telegraphy in Great Britain. Nature 130, 731–732 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130731d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130731d0