Communicate like back then: telegraph in the city museum restored

The city museum of Unterschleißheim has restored two old teleprinters.

You can communicate with them like back then.

Unterschleißheim - The city museum of Unterschleißheim is currently closed and is being fundamentally redesigned.

And yet it is open, as the museum can be visited virtually on the Internet.

The museum depot is full of things that have disappeared.

Some things stand unnoticed in a corner and get out of sight until water drips from a fan heater.

Under the dripping device there is a covered box that nobody noticed.

The box is moved away from the damp wall to limit the damage.

Under the cover is a device with a keyboard like a typewriter and a rotary dial like an old telephone.

What might that be?

A teleprinter of the type T 37h in bad condition, brought back to light and still to be saved.

Where there is a thing, a suitable one is not far away, another T100a teleprinter, a table model.

Teletype "revived"

In today's information age, it is almost impossible to imagine that conveying information over long distances was still a challenge in the previous century.

The telegraph as the original form of the electrical communication device initially only transmitted short or long signals, which were translated by appropriately trained people from Morse code into "human-readable" script.

In the case of the teleprinter, this translation was done by the device and the built-in typewriter put the text on paper straight away.

These rather noisy news deliverers soon found themselves in newsrooms and agencies.

+

Table model: the Siemens teleprinter T100a.

© Beatrix Dargel

Under the direction of the museum employee Emil Schwarzer and Robert Castor, a graduate engineer for electrical engineering, the two teleprinters were "revived" with sometimes arduous work.

Now they can communicate with each other.

Send and receive messages.

Emil Schwarzer remembers his time as a student in Munich.

At that time there was a device in a glass case near a newspaper on Sendlinger Strasse.

The device, a teleprinter, kept rattling, the pile of paper kept growing.

"Back then it was a crowd puller for a lot of people who passed by."

Data transfer clear

An online exhibition by Dr.

Stephan Bachter (City Museum Unterschleißheim) and Dr.

Andreas Garitz (record Café Augsburg).

The website reads: “Worlds, cultures and lifestyles are disappearing.

What remains of it are the things.

Things only say goodbye to everyday life and use, but they stay there, in boxes, basements and in attics, in hidden corners under the ground.

And in museum depots! "

If you visit the website www.verschwundene-dinge.de, you will get to the teletype via: the topics, office work and everyday life, teletype.

The telex model T100a as a table model and the telex T 37h from Siemens.

The two devices were linked to a local network so that the data transfer is clear, ready for demonstration purposes with hum and rattle.

Just things that tell stories.

Group registration: