

“U Tr?”: Abbreviations Used by Early-20th-Century Telegraph Operators - dnetesn
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_telegraph_operators_abbreviations_used_by_telegraphers.html?wpsrc=fol_tw

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Osmium
There's a charming book about a long-distance relationship between telegraph
operators called _Wired Love_ by Ella Cheever Thayer. The writing itself isn't
anything special, but it is remarkably prescient.

Here's a particularly insightful quotation:

> ... we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some
> genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for
> instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each
> other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to
> take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah!
> blissful lovers of the future!

Note that this was published in _1879!_

[http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_...](http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2013/07/wired_love_a_ta.php)
[via Boing Boing]

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353)

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Chinjut
The telephone had already been invented at that point, yeah? So the prediction
was simply that telephones would become small and wireless. An accurate
prediction, of course, but not a shocking one to venture.

~~~
Osmium
Perhaps. Though I would say that we've become very used to things becoming
"small and wireless" over the last several decades, so that it almost seems
inevitable now, but I'm not sure that's always been the case.

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acjohnson55
The book The Information by James Gleick introduced me to this bit of history.
It's an incredible book for plenty of other reasons, including discussions of
West African talking drums, Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace, and plenty of
other things. Highly recommended!

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athenot
Interesting to see the similarities with SMS abbreviations.

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keenerd
More interesting are the differences caused by the medium of Morse Code. The
characters are variable length and the dashes are 3x as long as the dots. So
dash-heavy letters* are more likely to be dropped. Also why you rarely see
numbers: the longest letter is four symbols but every digit is five symbols.
In many cases it would be faster to use roman numerals.

* 3 dashes: J O Q Y. 2 dashes: C G K M P W X Z.

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Ellipsis753
It's strange they never directly tell you what "U Tr?" means.

The table they provide is backwards for decoding this, but it looks like it
means: "You there?" as in "Are you there?"

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ksenzee
This linked article is also well worth reading:
[http://sundaymagazine.org/2010/08/from-1890-the-first-
text-m...](http://sundaymagazine.org/2010/08/from-1890-the-first-text-
messages/)

