A short time ago, the GF Corporate Archives were handed a manual which at first remained puzzling: What might GF’s "Private Telegraphic Code" from 1913 be all about? As we set out to describe the booklet for our archival database, a story from the history of telecommunications opened up to us, piece by piece.
As it turned out, the manual belongs to a multitude of telegraphic codes which were in use from the 1860s until the 1950s. The basic functioning of the electric telegraph is simple: A message consisting of letters and digits is translated into morse signals and then sent through a wire using electrical pulses. At their destination the morse signals are retranslated into letters and digits. After the establishment of the telegraph network, messages whose transport as letters would have taken days could be sent in a few minutes, and already in 1866, Europa and North America were connected via the Atlantic cable. (GF’s founder Johann Conrad Fischer wrote in 1845 that the telegraph wires’ “speedy reports leave even the fastest steam train far behind them like a lame horse”.) Because of limited signal carrying capacity telegrams were charged according to their length, a fact that soon gave rise to the development of the terse telegram style.
Telegraphic code books such as the GF code took another step by rendering whole sequences of words and standardized phrases as single codewords or sequences of digits. During the heyday of telegraphy, hundreds of such codebooks were developed, being especially popular with businesspeople. Translated into morse signals, the single code word was much cheaper to send than the original full sentence would have been. Provided the receiver of the message had the right codebook at hand, he or she could extend the condensed codeword back into the full sentence again. Summarised to make this easier to understand: If the sender used a telegraphic code, she first translated her message into one or several codewords. She then brought the coded message to the telegrapher who, in a second step, translated it into morse signals and sent it out. On the receiving side, the morse signals were first translated back into characters and digits by the telegrapher, resulting in codewords. Finally, these were retranslated into clear text by the recipient of the message using the same telegraphic code as the sender.
Commonly used telegraph codes contained a wide variety of expressions that might be useful in a business context. For example, in the popular sixth edition of the "ABC" code, ARPUK signified “The person is an adventurer, have nothing to do with him” while PYTUO translated into “collided with an iceberg”. Alongside with these commercial codes, sector-specific codes existed such as a 724 page codebook intended for use by missionaries. In their specialized code, they could send out SWAMK which translates as “Join us in prayer for funds”. On the other hand, important firms like GF established their own private codes for communication both within the enterprise and with customers. The GF telegraphic code comes across as a comparatively thin booklet – it allowed for the expression of almost three hundred messages. Usually these had to do with the ordering of castings and with shipping modalities. GF relied on a code made up of digits which conformed to a style of private codes in use on the European continent. In the GF code, each of the phrases was built up from five digits. The reason for this length was that, according to the rules of the International Telegraph Union, one coded sequence of five digits was billed as one word.
The five-digit expressions worked as follows: The first digit functioned as a so-called “Leading Figure” determining the general topic of the message. The second through fourth digits specified the statement or, if no further specification was required, could be filled with a zero as a placeholder. The meaning of the second to fourth digits depended on the “Leading Figure” chosen. The fifth digit was used as a “check-figure” to guard against possible errors in telegraphic transmission: The first four figures of the message were count together, and the sum of the digits of the resulting number was attached to the message as a fifth digit. By doing the same addition himself, the recipient was able to quickly check if the first four digits sent in morse code had been received correctly. If the check-figure didn’t match the preceding figures he could ask for a retransmission. Since a single morse signal sent wrongly or lost in transmission was able to distort the content of the message, this safeguard was important.
Example from the GF Code manual: A customer telegraphed the message “23321” to GF (the telegraphic address was “Stahlwerk Schaffhausen”). The leading figure was 2, signifying “Order”. If the message was sent from a customer to GF, as was the case here, this translated into “We order from you”. The message in its entirety was then interpreted as follows: “We order from you” – “castings rough” – “prices and conditions as usual” – “castings to be case-hardened by us” – check-figure “1” (2+3+2+2=10, 1+0="1"). Such a message could be followed by other messages encoded in the GF private code. When more complex circumstances needed to be adressed, the sender could combine codes from three commonly used codebooks with the GF code. Codes from the former could be expressed using letters to avoid confusion with GF code messages.
A proprietary telegraphic code such as GF’s might fulfill several purposes at once. On the surface, it allowed for significant savings in telegraph costs by shortening the most common messages. Second, it afforded a certain degree of secrecy. This offered protection both for business relationships with individual partners and against insights into the course of business as a whole: If a third party was able to intercept a message, its content was not decipherable without the proper manual. If the competition got its hands on several messages, considerable effort had to be spent in order to decrypt them. Thus, there was no immediate way to extract information, for example about demand for certain products, from a large number of transmissions. Lastly the company code promised a degree of customer retention. Having got used to writing and deciphering the code, further commissions of GF-made products was an obvious choice for business partners. How readily customers adopted the GF-code in reality remains unknown.
Some codebooks, such as the aforementioned "ABC" or the "Acme"-code, became widely used while others allowed for the expression of myriad facts and circumstances. As an example, the private code of one cash register company comprised 400000 expressions. Up until the second world war, commercial telegraphic codes were an indispensable tool for business messages and for the rest of private telegraphy as well. The war brought an initial restriction, as several of the nations involved reduced the variety of codebooks permitted. After the war two developments led to the extinction of commercial telegraphic codes. The first of these was the rise of teletype systems which allowed for a direct transmission of text without the necessity of converting it into morse signals first. The implementation of such systems was made possible by the falling costs of telegraphy and the growing capacity of telecommunications networks. Competition to telegraphy arose from long-distance telephone calls and from air mail, too. The second development concerned the generally high wages after the war: When the labor cost of a specialized telegraphist exceeded the cost of uncoded telegrams, it didn't make much sense anymore to employ the former. This was the case especially if he or she first had to spend time familiarizing themselves with private codes. The GF Private Telegraphic Code remains a fascinating testimony to the company’s early internationalization – even if, at the Iron Library, we prefer communicating by telephone, teams-call or e-mail.
