It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories. This is a real story, and an excerpt from chapter 12 of my book Shift Happens.

The keyboards of the first teletypes looked as if the Shift Wars had happened in an alternate timeline won by typewriters with two Shifts, a century before the arrival of the iPhone. The first teletypes were, too, built with only three banks of keys, the digits sharing the top row of QWERTY. Among the most common was the striking green keyboard of Teletype Model 15, made by a company that – like many – renamed itself after its most popular product. The 15s were robust, heavy, and almost indestructible; 200,000 were made between 1930 and 1954, their production prolonged by World War II.

But the comparison to typewriters with two Shifts broke down as soon as you sat down to a teletype. There was one key called Figs and another called Ltrs, but there was no actual shifting. The two keys were meant to be used alone – pressing one would affect the meaning of all the keys used after it. Figs switched the teletype into digits and punctuation mode; Ltrs made all the keys once again behave as letters. The digits and punctuation covered all the common cases, but the letters were available only in uppercase, and remained so for a long, long time.

The reason for switching instead of shifting went back to Baudôt and his five keys. Five keys give thirty-one possibilities – not enough for the letters of the alphabet, digits, and common punctuation. So Baudôt added two non-printing combinations. Pressing just the leftmost key would switch the machine to think of letters; pressing just the second key from the left would make it focus on digits. Every chord’s character depended on what mode the machine was in: right index finger was A or 1, the middle index finger E or 2, four leftmost fingers meant L or the equals sign. Thirty-one possible combinations became fifty-eight. And even when teletypes switched to a QWERTY keyboard, under the hood they still relied on a modernized version of Baudôt’s code, switching and all.

There were more differences from typewriter keyboards. The keys had an unusual, cushioned feel: each key had a small spring inside for more comfortable typing. For the first time in history, the tops of the keys were held to the base magnetically and could be removed, making it easy to swap them for different uses. And the common mechanical gesture of the carriage return had been decoupled into two separate keys – Car Ret and Line Feed. Carriage return moved the carriage back to the beginning of the line; line feed advanced to the next line. This was done to give the teletype a bit more time for a carriage return to complete. The split was manual, however; the operator had to press the two keys one at a time, in the correct order, with every new line.

Look at post-World War II teletypes, and you’ll find other interesting keys. One common one was labeled Who Are You? Pressing it would generate a special invisible code and ask the other machine to introduce itself. It was sometimes done automatically; other times it required the interlocutor to press a key labeled Here Is, which mechanically output a pre-recorded sequence of letters identifying the location, like DE G3PPD HARROW.

You might also stumble upon another ingenious physical-world backspace. Did you press a key by mistake, creating the wrong set of holes in the paper tape? You could rewind one spot and punch out all the other holes. It was kind of like backspacing on a typewriter and typing x over a typo, but it was invisible – no one was meant to read the tape itself, and the teletypes were programmed to ignore the five-hole position when printing the text on regular paper. And since paper tape was effectively infinite, a message with many corrected typos would have only one side effect – it would arrive marginally slower than one typed neatly.

The Who Are You?, Here Is, and Backspace keys were enhancements that came after the Model 15. But even the earlier model sported one unique key: S/Bell. In letters mode, Bell would do as expected and print a letter S. Switch to digits and punctuation mode, however, and the teletype would ring a bell. It would do so not just on the machine you used, but also on the teletype on the other side.

It wasn’t a gentle typewriter bell alerting you to the end of the line, either. The teletype bell harkened back to an idea in an 1837 telegraph by Cooke and Wheatstone, its ringing meant to alert someone that a message was coming. And sometimes, it was an important message.

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The Morse code-powered telegraph network gave us a taste of what an internet could be. Teletypes added automation. In the late 1920s, the next step was Telex, a global network that connected business teletypes.

Elsewhere, post offices in many countries brought telegraphy to the masses by introducing telegrams, a way to send a written message to someone via telegraph or teletype. No knowledge of Morse code or typing was necessary. The message would be typed in at the post office by a teletype clerk, travel through the wires, the resulting printout cut into pieces at the receiving station, and eventually be delivered by a clerk to the recipient’s doorstep as if it were a regular letter. Telegrams were much faster than letters, as they traveled mostly through wires; were much cheaper than long-distance phone calls; and didn’t require your recipient to have any technology in their house. (They also introduced the now-forgotten tradition of saying STOP in between sentences, and they begot the art of making messages as short as possible, later perfected in texting and on Twitter.)

But what was most commonly associated with the telegraph first and teletypes later was the instant broadcast of world events. The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and United Press International (UPI) took Morse’s “Have you any news?” to heart, and established competing networks of teletypes clacking impatiently with the latest bulletins. Their correspondents would dictate by phone to their offices. The transcribed reports were typed in on one of the agency’s teletypes and sent within seconds to receiving teletypes in the subscribing newspapers. Since most of it happened over wires, it was often called “the wire service.” One UPI employer remembered:

Nothing was true in those days unless the wire services said it was. Confirmation was on the yellow paper rolling out of Teletypes. There was no 24/7 cable TV news. No emailing. No tweeting.

The teletypes were a common fixture in newspapers, “as common as a bathroom, although the machines probably were kept in better repair,” as one reporter recalled. “There was something about the throbbing of teletypes that made reporters and editors feel alive,” an article noted in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986.

They used electromechanical technologies similar to those in electric typewriters. They were, however, driven by paper tape, and so their typing was distinctively machine-like, always at the constant speed of about 60wpm. “They made a low, guttural engine noise – rugrugrugrugrug – punctuated by that loud da dacka-dacka dak-dak, and they were as constant and pokey as a pair of plowmules. They. Yielded. Their. Secrets. One. Word. At. A. Time,” wrote the seasoned Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David O’Reilly. Just as many newspapers put the word Telegraph in their titles in the nineteenth century to align themselves with the high tech of that time, the next century witnessed many TV or radio news programs adding the distinctive cacophony of multiple clattering teletypes to their opening titles.

One surprising but important component in the sharing of news was the S/Bell key. Its use evolved over time. It was no longer just about catching attention – the number of bells grew to signify the importance of upcoming news. On UPI teletypes, three bells meant “Urgent,” five bells indicated a “Bulletin,” and ten bells was a “Flash” – a story so rare and significant that it changed the world’s trajectory.

Flash stories were reserved for earth-shattering events: a declaration of war, a president’s resignation, the death of the Pope. They would cause a newspaper printing plant foreman to yell “stop the presses” and a TV station manager to interrupt shows with breaking news. “Guys had worked in newsrooms for years and never heard ten bells,” wrote the Philadelphia Enquirer. Another columnist put it more bluntly: “when [a teletype’s] bells chimed out a Bulletin or Flash, it was like God clearing His throat.”

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God cleared their throat on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 local time. UPI reporter Merriman Smith, riding in the motorcade just behind the president, got ahold of the press car’s radiophone and called UPI with the news. Soon, a few thousand UPI subscriber teletypes across the world started printing in unison. One inside the U. S. government cabinet plane reported:

HANDSOME DR. ALEL DOHRN. %% WAS N IDEALIST BUT BROKE
THE LAW IN AT LEAST IP OF THE QNEPP STERILIZATION
OPERATIONS HE HAS PERFORME ON LOCAL WOMEN
MORE
HS137PEST
RV
SSSSSSSS
FLASH
KENNEDY SERIOSTY WOUNDED PESTSSSSSSSSSS
HS 138/
SSSSSSSSSSS
MAKE THAT PERHAPS PERHAPS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED
HSQEOPEST
SSSSSSSSSSSSSS
GJ OWHL W WOUNDED BY
HQ139PESTXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
KENNEDY WOUNDED PERHAPS FATALLY BY VASSASSINS BULLET
HS139PESTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

The chaos of the garbled transmission seems to capture the magnitude of the news. Knowing how teletypes – and their keyboards – worked, we can decipher most of it, starting with a few lines from a message from Hanover, West Germany: an update in the trial of a local doctor.

Then the Dallas messages start taking over, although not without trouble. Typos likely happened in a hurry to get the message out, and the unusual spacing came from not giving enough time for Car Ret and Line Feed actions to finish their job. (Either could also have been the result of the Hanover and Dallas teletypes talking over each other on the same line at the same moment.)

HS137PEST and others like it were standard signatures following each transmission: two letters for the initials of the operator, and seven to indicate 1:37pm Eastern time. How about HSQEOPEST? It’s the operator forgetting to press the Figs key, or the signal being lost in transmission – the keystrokes 1 3 9, meaning 1:39pm, come out as QEO, as the receiving teletype never switched to speaking in digits.

This is the reason we see a repeated line of X, meant to be slashes separating one message from another. That also explains the long lines of confused letters S, and makes them more harrowing – those were meant to be bells, ringing to alert everyone of an event that shook the nation like few did in the twentieth century. But the switch to digits mode never happens or is lost in transmission, and the machines, obedient and clueless, interpret the transmitted data blindly. Counting the letters betrays the urgency, the desperation, or the despair felt by the teletype operator typing in the message. In a break with protocol, the early eight and ten bells grow to eleven, and then to an unprecedented sixteen bells.

This wasn’t God clearing their throat – this was God caught surprised. The president was dying. Just a few minutes after seeing the UPI’s messages, CBS interrupted its mid-day soap opera to put on air a distraught Walter Cronkite, and soon the other two networks followed, suspending their usual programming for the subsequent three days and nights.

On the wire, the uncanny intersection of human emotions and machine coldness continued, as transmissions of people oblivious to the tragic events in Dallas interleaved with frantic shouting from others:

STAY OFF ALL OF YOU STAY OFF AND KEEP OFF GET OFF
WILL U U P L E A S E STAY OFF THIS WIRE
STAY OFF STAY OFF

But in time, everyone understood and the day’s other events surrendered. An hour after the shooting, another teletype operator, Alice Guenther, started a new shift at the UPI offices. Four minutes later, the White House sent out the feared message of President Kennedy’s death. The broadcast news editor asked Alice to key it into the teletype, but her reaction reminded us that despite all the mechanization and the rhythmic ticking of teletype machines, sitting behind keyboards were still people. Guenther could not make herself finish the task. She took her hands from the keyboard, covered her face, collapsed, and cried “Oh, my God.” The operator supervisor, Jimmy Darr, walked over to her, lifted her out of the chair, let her sit gently on the floor, and leaned over the keyboard. Thirty-nine keystrokes later, at 1:35 Dallas time, thousands of UPI teletypes rang ten bells for one more time that day, and then printed, at a measured pace:

FLASH

PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

JT135PCS