Every so often, something notable turns up on the web, and as one of the subjects I'm always on the lookout for is early telegraphy notes - because of places such as Ganavan and the TAT-1 transatlantic cable - I like to follow any search finds that throw up related items.

The following is quite old in some respects, but I think this adds to, rather than detracts, from its value, because it means it was written by people who were closer to, and probably active in, the subject material. Something that modern historians seem all to keen to forget when they write retrospectively, and fail to pay due deference to their subject, and try to make make themselves sound like authorities well versed in their subject material - instead, they poke fun at their material with the benefit of hindsight, and try to make themselves appear "clever" by dong so.

I think it just makes them self-righteous, smug idiots not worth reading or listening to

Short History of Telegraphy - Index

It is worth reading The Victorian Internet if you have not already done so, there are a lot of parallels between the development of the telegraph and the Internet.

Another very interesting one is The Singing Line by Alice Thompson who is descended from Charles Todd who built the first telegraph line across Australia.

Many years ago I bought a copy of The Old Telegraphs in one of Foyle's annual book sales for a few pounds.  I think it is still the definitive book on mechanical telegraphs.  I have never seen any books on the mechanical telegraph lines in Scotland but there is an excellent one, Faster than the Wind, on the line along the North Wales coast from Liverpool to Holyhead with details of each site along the line and what remains are still there.

MB

I had many discussions with an older chap from Greenock who was employed during the war to listen in to enemy signals from various places in Europe. He was before and after the war a piano tuner. Obviously had a good ear. He said you good identify a signals origin from the speed of the dots and dashs. Every signaller had their own unique signature They called this FIST don't know what ths stands for. But was always fascinating talking to him.

I wouldn't swear to it absolutely, but in terms of usage, "fist" seems to be an American term (and now a bit unfortunate - which I won't expand on). In morse operator terms however, the fist is just the shape of the hand, and this became the reference to the operators' keying fingerprint, which a skilled listener could detect.

Unless the morse was as bad as mine ever was, in which case this technique would have been useless

The phenomenon has been used in a number of wartime films, where either side would detect that their agent had been captured, and another morse operator was passing messages using their codename, either to try and hide the fact that the agent had be captured, or to pass false information to trap others.

The British reference was to TINA, and referred to the "fingerprint" of operators, which we have a brief note about here:

Secret Scotland - Kinnaber

As noted there, TINA appears to have been a codename rather than an acronym, but if anyone knows better, we'd be grateful for any further details.

Intercept operators become used to the "fist" of each operator on a net which was useful if the net changed frequency and they had to search for the new frequency.

But the most important use was in verification that SOE (and probably SIS) operators were genuine and the Germans had not taken over the station.  Each radio operator recorded some morse on paper tape before leaving.  There is an example in Secret Warfare, it is described as TINA Radio Fingerprint Analysis there is no explanation of the origin of "TINA".  They then plotted out the length of dots and dashes for each letter on graph paper.  Another example in the book shows how two operators could be easily distinguished.  A new recording was made each month.

This system was brought into use in the Summer of 1943.  The book suggests that it was more effective than the complicated verification systems in the coding and perhaps the operators would have been less nervous if they had known that substitutions could be so easily identified.

MB