TRAINING ’TELEGRAPH OPERATORS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 145, 15 March 1939, Page 6

TRAINING ’TELEGRAPH OPERATORS

Post Office Schools Though this is the day of the machine in telegraphy, it is still necessary for every operator in the Post Office to be welt trained in the transmission of morse signals by hand. Two training schools are maintained and at least. 40 young men are under tuition either in Christchurch or Auckland. Before entering the school they require a knowledge of the morse code and to be able to transmit at the rate of about. 20 words a minute. Under instruction their style of sending is improved and their speed gradually worked up. They are also instructed in the adjustment of telegraph instruments and in the procedure for handling traffic*. The instructors have to give special attention to the pupils’ handwriting, for it has been found that one of the problems is to train the young telegraphists to produce good legible manuscript at n rate of 25 words a minute. The telegraphic recruits are of an excellent class, the records of the two schools last year, showing that, though 113 pupils qualified, only nine had to be failed.

Some of the pupils are then transferred to a multiplex school, which occupies a section of the busy operat-ing-room in Wellington. Here, surrounded by trained operators, they fit themselves to use mechanical transmission from the perforated tape. The message has to be typed, the impressions coming out as perforations on a narrow paper tape instead of in Arabic characters, though at the other end of the circuit plain letters re-ap-pear for delivery to the recipient of the telegram. As a preliminary the cadets are trained on ordinary typewriters, but the keyboards are screened so that they must type by touch, the objective being to do this at 45 words a minute for 15 minutes. As codes are often used in commercial messages, particularly cables, the “touch” typing test for live-letter code is 40 words a minute for 10 minutes. Only one error is permitted. The experience in the schools is that touch typewriting up to the Post Office standard of speed and accuracy can be learned in 80 to 100 hours of tuition, and many of the pupils who do tills had never previously used a typewriter. Finally, the pupils are transferred to the telegraph perforator and they tire there trained to read the perforations in the tape and how to handle general traffic. An important test at this stage is one of ability to transmit in an hour, with a very small margin of error, 50 telegrams of the varied type that they tire likely to encounter in their ordinaryoperating work.