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Don Kimberlin's Notes on Early Radio, The Future of A.M., Questioning Marconi, Remembering ITT, Hearing Spark, A.M. and F.M., Negative and Positive

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Remembering ITT

Tom Farley back again, writing here. IT&T tried being the world-wide equivalent to AT&T. In some ways they succeeded. Little exists about IT&T on the web but you'll find many good books about them in any large library. They had two eras, the first, founding and development, led by the Behn brothers, and the second, a rebirth and expansion, led by Harold Geneen. How did they start?

In 1925 Western Electric sold its overseas manufacturing plants to a small company with a big name and even bigger ideas: International Telephone and Telegraph. A controversial decision within the Bell System. AT&T sold factories in 11 countries, fearing a United States anti-trust lawsuit. Western kept one foreign company: Canadian Northern Electric, holding it until 1957. AT&T would not return officially to the international market until 1977.

ITT's owners, the curious, conspiratorial Behn brothers, Sosthenes and Hernand, bought Western Electric International for 30 million dollars and renamed it International Standard Electric. Their purchase, backed by J.P. Morgan's bank, included Western's large British manufacturer, renamed Standard Telephones and Cable. The Behns agreed not to compete in America against Western Electric, and to be the export agent for AT&T products abroad. AT&T agreed in return not to compete internationally against the Behns. Now equipped with a large manufacturing arm, IT&T spread across the globe, buying and influencing telephone companies (and their governments) on nearly every continent.

IT&T reorganized and moved into new industries in the late1950s after Sosthenes Behn died. Harold Geneen, an obsessive and ruthless man, at times criminal, took charge. Don Kimberlin relates,

"Harold Geneen's arrival put accountants clearly in charge. During my own time there, the engineers were still reeling from the way in which Geneen trashed all their technology heritage, both figuratively and literally. If it didn't make money in the current accounting cycle, it wasn't worth having around."

"I have my own perfect example, having been the project engineer who found a revolutionary way to improve telegraphy on the then worldwide Telex network. My technique was highly successful, and increased the capacity of an analog voice channel from at first 24 TTY's, then 46, then 92, and ultimately 184 as the serial data modems that supported it increased in capacity from 2400 to 4800 and then 9600 bps."

"That project impressed Park Avenue enough that they featured that 'ITT World's First' on the cover of the annual report....then forgot about it. Geneen was the sort who'd say, 'OK, so what did you do for me this year?' He wouldn't invest in people whose creativity didn't match the accounting cycle. I left ITT to utlimately work for a developer who had me take the new technology to Africa and the Mid-East."

"In that regard, we had to solve a number of marketing problems. One of them was Saddam Hussein, who wanted our Time Division Multiplexing technique because we'd proved and sold it to the Saudis. However, Iraq had alrady embargoed American goods."

"Cable and Wireless stepped into the transaction to broker it and sanitize the deal. At the time, it was interesting because the Iraqis actually came to us, even visiting our company and factory run by American Jews, but then they backed off to have C&W make the purchase and install the goods. No small part of it was the Arab embargo on components from 'corporate supporters of Zionism.' That included most of our semiconductor suppliers -- Fairchild, Motorola and such. The Iraqis sent people from their embassy to our plant, negotiating the price and having us paint out all offending parts ID's in the product, the drawings and the parts lists, to make a special product for them. They paid dearly for us to make our products acceptable to their inspectors -- and C&W benefited from the increased cash flow in the deal."

privateline.comm reader Ron McKinney had a personal encounter with Geenen: "In the winter of 1971, I was an out of work carpenter. Granite Construction Company was building a sewage treatment plant in Homestead, FL. Having previously worked for the company in San Francisco, I drove out to the site, but learned that they had all of the carpenters they needed. So I picked up the Miami Herald and spotted an ad placed by the manager of the Key Biscayne Hotel and Tennis Club. I was hired to remodel a suite of rooms for the owner, Harold Geneen. It wasn't uncommon to see numerous Secret Service agents around the place, as President Richard M. Nixon and his friend Beebe Rebozo were frequent guests. At the time, Nixon's home on Key Biscayne was being remodeled. You may recall that this was a time when Nixon's aides, were busy covering up the Administration's connection with the Plumbers' break-in at the Watergate and their other illegal activities, such as wire tapping Nixon's 'enemies.'"

Hearing Spark

Yes, I am interested in "spark," and I even heard one on the job once in 1962. I had only been working for AT&T for about 6 months, in their HF station at Ft. Lauderdale, FL, where we had the HF ship station WOM (the shore end of "The Love Boats." A number of our technical operators had been ship radio officers and were real whizzes on the Morse key - and I mean the American Morse used on our order wire to the transmitter plant, or the International Morse used on the radio (which we were licensed for to use in calling and setting up links). One day, one of them called me over and said, "Listen, that's a sparker!" It must have been a Poulsen arc, as it sounded rather musical and was transmitting up around 8 mHz with a fairly narrow bandwidth.

I later learned that some US Navy ships of WWI and a bit later still carried a Poulsen arc (made by Federal at San Francisco, FYI) as a backup. Apparently someone was just testing it.

For example, there is, near you, history of the Federal Radiotelegraph Company of San Francisco, at which a young Stanford student went to Denmark and got himself the US license for Valdimer Poulsen's megnetically-quenched arc, which he ultimately sold to the US (and other friendly) navies. That culminated in building four monstrous one megawatt arc converters for a gigantic 12 kHz link between the US Navy at Arlington, VA and the shore of Bordeaux in France. It had been ordered by "Blackjack" Pershing as a fallback to the transatlantic cables in WWI, fearing the Germans would cut the cables across the Atlantic.

It turned out the war ended before the French station was completed, and the French then, out of a sort of honor we no longer seem to have, purchased it as a means of appreciation for saving them from the Germans. That was all well and good, but when the French tried to use it, they found the beast generated harmonics of 12.7 kHz that interfered with all the other nascent forms of radio that were emergining in France by 1920 -- so it had to be abandoned. Today, the tower bases are still there, and there's a small local group who try to keep the memory alive. You can see their website at:

http://www.u-e-f.net/uef-histoire/croixhins.htm

A.M. and F.M.

As to the long-standing AM vs FM debate, Barry and I have the distinct advantage of a close liaison with a radio consulting engineer who does understand the math, and he has provided us with copies of the earlier Carson papers. When we get into discussion about this, his read is that one is a half-full cup while the other is a half-empty cup. In other words, when you optimize each, they are so close, it's hard to find a difference.

Let me give you an example I can explain: When I was a product manager for modems at Paradyne Corporation, we were pushing the limit of commercial viablity for voiceband modems. Our designers chose phase-modulated modems, while our arch-rivals, Codex, chose what was the university-professor; math-on-the-blackboard textbook favorite, vestigial sideband AM modems (which is what the Bell Labs engineers were big on, too).

I had to come up with some advertising for our salesmen to sell with. So, I asked our designer what it was about. Tom Armstrong (that was really his name!) told me, "VSB has a textbook advantage of 1/2 dB in signal-to-noise requirement over PM. But, none of its proponents took the time to find out how long it takes a VSB modem to regain sync and get into operation when there is a noise hit. That is so much longer that, over time, a PM modem gets much more data through. We think that data throughput is what our customers want, not theoretical perfection."

Hey, I just paraphrased Tom's words, and we devastated the competition! And, addressing some of your remarks, yes, early FM was quite complex compared to AM and SSB, which would be less expensive to manufacture. But, there's a key point in the AM vs.FM story that gets lost: The others really wanted Armstrong's FM but they didn't want to pay him patent license fees. (I dearly wish I hadn't let the Armstrong patent license document that hung on the wall at WTSP-FM next to the FCC license get lost!) Armstrong's patent was limited. He defined FM as a high-fidelity radio transmission method, and said it required a modulation index exceeding 1.0 to get the 60 dB S/N that made it "hi-fi." Bell Labs dearly needed FM to make its microwave systems work. They limited their modulation index to less than 1.0, and invented "phase modulation" for the world -- and themselves to be patent license free! Sarnoff went a bit futher. He waited for Armstong to commit suicide, then let RCA loose on FM for both TV audio and radio broadcasting. So, you see, usable systems can be made of both AM, FM and even "substandard" PM, if you just optimize the system they work in.

I am constantly amazed at how few people understand the concept of a "noise floor," and how, because we badger authorities like the FCC to allow more and more stations, we have raised the noise floor. Just a week ago, I happened to be at a convention of broadcasters in Charlotte, where two were amazing themselves about how a new AM station on the California coast, operating in the new expanded AM band above 1600 kHz, said they had listeners in Hawaii. Well, duh - first off, 5,000 micromho saltwater for a path, and then nobody else on the channel to create interference! What do you expect? And, how long before there is someone else on their channel, anyway?

Negative or Positive

Depending upon whether your company had originated from Western Union or from a later radio "upstart" like Marconi, your batteries might have either their negative or their positive terminals connected to ground. It's all part of the Great Debate about whether electrical Mother Earth has a negative or a positive tendency, and the effort to reduce cathodic erosion of grounding terminals in the plant. And that reflected into whether, on polar telegraph circuits, marking current was postive or negative. At ITT in NY, when we got circuits in from Western Union or WUI, their
marking current was always positive, and we'd have to match them, because they would not change!

When we got circuits in from RCA, they'd always be negative mark, and we'd have to match them, because they would not change! At ITT, we liked negative mark, but we'd adapt to the others, just to get business done. I can't imagine what must have gone on when the two of them tried to interconnect!

At any rate, you could see the historical heritage of Western Union and RCA in each of these. And what was our heritage that made ITT so accommodating?

Remember Postal Telegraph? That manually-run, scrambling around outfit owned by ITT that gave Western Union such fits pre-WWII that Western went to the FCC to sue ITT out of the domestic telegraph business? See, the story all fits together!

Don Kimberlin's Notes on Early Radio, The Future of A.M., Questioning Marconi, Remembering ITT, Hearing Spark, A.M. and F.M., Negative and Positive

<---- back to main telephone history article