From Telegraph Boys to Teleprinters

For the first several decades of commercial telegraphy, sending a message required two entirely separate skilled trades: an operator who could translate written words into Morse code by hand, and, once the message arrived, a messenger boy who physically ran or bicycled it to its final recipient. Both jobs were made obsolete by the same invention, though it took decades for the second one to fully disappear.

The Human Layer at Both Ends

A 19th-century telegram wasn't a single seamless process — it was a relay of specialists. A customer wrote out their message at a telegraph office, a trained operator converted it into Morse code and tapped it out, a receiving operator on the other end decoded the incoming clicks back into written words, and finally a messenger — very often a teenage boy on a bicycle, a fixture of city life across America and Britain for generations — carried the finished, transcribed telegram the last mile to the actual recipient's door. Every step in that chain depended on trained human skill, and the operator's role specifically required years of practice to reach commercial sending and receiving speed.

A New Zealander's Fix for the Bottleneck

Donald Murray, an engineer born in New Zealand, spent the early 1900s working on a way to remove the trained-Morse-operator bottleneck from the middle of that process entirely. His system, developed and refined starting around 1901, modified an earlier code devised by Émile Baudot so that an ordinary typist — someone with no Morse training at all — could type a message on a keyboard resembling a regular typewriter, which would then automatically translate each keystroke into the electrical code needed to transmit it. On the receiving end, the equivalent machine would print the incoming message out directly as ordinary readable text, with no operator needed to decode anything by ear or by hand. Murray's version of the code also introduced practical refinements still recognizable today, including dedicated codes for carriage return and line feed.

Western Union Buys In

On April 12, 1912, Murray sold the North American rights to his system to Western Union, and the company began gradually converting its network away from manually keyed Morse telegraphy toward these new teleprinters, or teletypewriters. The commercial logic was straightforward: a typist could be trained in days rather than years, and the same machine handled both the sending and receiving side without requiring anyone to actually know a dot-and-dash code at all. Western Union continued using a version of Murray's code for its own network operations well into the 1950s, decades after the initial rollout began.

One Job Ended Quickly, the Other Lingered

The transition eliminated the need for trained Morse operators at teleprinter-equipped stations fairly directly — once a typist could send and receive without any Morse skill at all, there was no ongoing commercial reason to keep paying for years of trained proficiency. The messenger boy, by contrast, survived the shift from Morse to teleprinter completely intact, because nothing about how a telegram got translated into a signal changed anything about how it got physically delivered to a recipient's front door once printed out. That job only faded later, gradually, as telephone ownership spread through the 20th century and made a personally delivered paper telegram less and less necessary for routine communication, a decline that had essentially nothing to do with Murray's invention and everything to do with a completely different technology arriving afterward.

Murray's Code Outlived the Telegram Itself

Murray's own code didn't stay tied to Western Union's telegram network either. Re-ordered and extended further, it was standardized internationally in 1932 as the CCITT's International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2, and that five-bit scheme — not ASCII — was the most common teleprinter code in the world for the next several decades, running telex networks across Europe long after Western Union's own domestic telegram business had faded into decline. It hasn't entirely disappeared even now: the same five-bit alphabet survives today in amateur radio's RTTY mode and in some telecommunications devices for the deaf, still doing useful work decades after the physical equipment Murray originally designed it for stopped being manufactured.

What Actually Survived From the Morse Era

The interesting detail in this transition is what didn't disappear: Morse code itself kept a mandatory role in maritime and military communication for the rest of the century, entirely separate from Western Union's commercial telegram network, because ship-to-shore and battlefield communication had different reliability requirements than routine domestic telegrams. Teleprinters solved the specific commercial problem of moving written business and personal messages quickly and cheaply across a fixed wired network — they never addressed the harder problem of a lone operator on a ship or in the field needing a message format that could be sent, received, and understood with only a simple transmitter, no printer, and no dedicated wire at all.