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Re: Telegram codebook & Renault archivist?



Since it's Friday, I can't restrain myself from suggesting that if one were to use the wrong codebook to decode the telegram, one might get some interesting results! (is it time to go home yet?)


Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Special Collections Librarian/Archivist

(note change of address as of May 2000)
Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY  12538
(914) 451-1757 or (845) 451-1757
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

>>> "Richard G. King Jr." <kingr@U.ARIZONA.EDU> 08/18/00 10:43AM >>>

Michael Tarabulski wrote: I'm working on a project that involves some diaries from 1925.  Mentioned in the diaries is a telegram code book. As I understand it, in those pay-by-the-word days, this codebook helped you save money on telegrams.  You'd say, "porkchops and applesauce, Sweetheart,"  and that would mean a whole lot more.  I have never seen such a book...me, a former railroad telegrapher.  Anybody
know where to find one?
Michael,
Don't know where to find one offhand but I used to own one.  I believe they were of two sorts, commercially available ones and ones developed by individual businesses with there own codes.  The one I had (I believe) listed single word codes e.g., "peanuts" and the text equivalent e.g, "Buy all the machine gun bullets you can".  I believe these were called commercial telegraph codes.  Of course since
everybody could buy and therefore understand what you were sending many companies developed their own codes.  If that's the case you would have a hard time deciphering coded entries or telegrams without the original, proprietary key.  Dick King

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