JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2075   History of Holes series 

While grazing through the 1859 volumes of the Comptes Rendus¹, looking around for anything having anything to do with Mr. Darwin and his Big Book published later in this year (on 24 November), I got a little lost as usual, and was digging around the early months, and came upon the drawing above.  Mostly I was attracted to it for the holes, as there is a longish thread/series on this blog devoted to the History of Holes, and though at first blush that it might actually be a Runic something, or Islander counting stick.  When I actually started to read the article it was none other than the recording strip for telegraphy, devised by Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), famous for his Wheatstone bridge and for his experimental determination of the speed of electricity²).  Now the recorder part of this was not on the receiving end, but rather on the sending–Wheatstone devised a way of recording the strokes of a telegrapher’s key and translating them into two rows of holes; the message was recorded on the strip of paper and then fed into a machine that would do the keywork, using the punched paper tape to control the transmitter–it turns out to have been a significantly faster method than by simply having messages struck by human operators, which was  abig deal at the time because of the expense of sending telegraphic messages, reaching speeds of 130 wpm early on (and then 300-400 wpm later on a good circuit)³.