Local Telegraph Office Now Linked With World’s First “Electrical Brain” In Hub-This Day In Norwood History-August 23, 1948

Norwood last Friday began to receive the benefits of the new era of ultra-modern communications. At 8 a.m. lines from the local telegraph office were cut into the world’s first automatic selective switching center at Boston, it was announced by Mr. Edward W. Whelton, local Western Union manager.

The $2,000,000 transmission center at Boston features an entirely new “electrical brain” which eliminates manual retransmission of telegrams. Local telegraph operators in Norwood and other points in a six-state area will control the “brain” by merely typing out “call letters” on their typewriterlike keyboards. By the new method of “selective switching”, for which they have been specially trained, the operators will have at their fingertips circuits connecting with every telegraph center in the country.

Until now, telegrams to and from Norwood were subject to manual relaying at Boston where they were sorted by routing clerks and carried by girls to operators, who retyped them. to another relay center on to their destinations.

Now these time-consuming steps have been eliminated. The Norwood operator transmitting a telegram controls the routing to any part of the country by merely typing two “call letters” at the beginning of the message These call letters will cause the electrical brain of the switching center at Boston to select the proper circuit and automatically flash the telegram onward to its destination.

In the case of a telegram addressed to San Francisco, for example, the Norwood operator will type the letters “SF”, representing the destination, on her typewriter-like keyboard before proceeding with the telegram itself. As the message flashes over a direct wire to the switching center at Boston, the electrical brain checks the call letters and an identifying message number to ensure their accuracy, automatically selects the San Francisco wire and ¡lashes the telegram to that city where it is received in finished form ready for delivery.

Incoming telegrams for Norwood will be received at the Boston switching center on a telegraph device known as a printer perforator which simultaneously prints the telegrams and punches combinations of holes on a paper tape. Switching clerks, seeing the destinations on the tape, will touch push-buttons marked Norwood, Mass. The pressing of a button will cause the perforated tape to run through a transmitter which will automatically transmit the message to this city.

In addition to the “cut-over” of Norwood’s telegraph office to the Boston center, circuits from all other cities in the six-state area are being connected to the new system one after another over a period of four weeks.

Several hundred telegraph people, including Manager Whelton and Miss Bernadine McAteer and Mrs. Gencvteve Whelton, of the local operating staff attended the Western Union school at Nashua. N H.. where they were trained in the control of the new telegraph robot.

The capacity of the new Boston center is three times greater than former facilities, Mr. Whelton explained. The installation Is one of the largest in the nationwide telegraph network of fifteen high-speed switching centers fast nearing completion. It required almost a year’s work by a large force of telegraph engineers and installers to complete the new system, which occupies two floors of the modern Western Union Building in Boston. The equipment, set up in aisle form, includes more than 3,000 miles of wire conductors and over a million wire connections.