New Zealand Inventor

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 73, 15 November 1940, Page 5

New Zealand Inventor

OW here is an eminent inventor, Donald Murray. He was born in Auckland in 1865. Educated in Auckland, he afterwards spent two years at the Agricultural College in Canterbury from 1884 to 1886, He graduated B.A. in Auckland but finished his university course in Sydney. Eight years afterwards Donald Murray went to New York with a telegraph invention which was designed for setting type by telegraph, by connecting the linotype to telegraph machinery. His slogan for his invention was, "This tape sets type." The Linotype Corporation of New York offered to pay for the development work necessary for applying it to the linotype. Actually the Postal Telegraph Company took it over for conversion into a printing telegraph, and Murray spent two years helping that company in the development of the apparatus. When it had reached practical form as the Murray Automatic Printing Telegraphy System, he brought it to London in 1901, where it

was taken up by the British Post Office. During the five years spent with the British Post Office as Printing Telegraph Engineer, he became M.LE.E. He established a telegraph engineering factory in London, and sold many installations of‘ his system to Germany, Austria, Russia and Sweden. A vital improvement was the conversion of the Murray Automatic into the Murray Multiplex Printing Telegraph System, and installations of this improved system were sold to many more countries, including Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. The American patent rights were bought by the Western Union Telegraph in 1912, and put into wide use all over the U.S. In 1921 Murray took up the agency for the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, a very ingenious machine like a typewriter. Finally the famous Teletype was evolved in the Morkrum Company’s factory. This revolutionised telegraphy and has been the means of saving millions of pounds to telegraph administrations the world over. In 1936, during ‘a visit to Chicago, Murray was shown at the teletype factory a teletype setter setting type just as he had planned when he came to New York in 1899---

("New Zealand Brains Abroad,’ Bernard Magee ena

Major

F. H.

Lampen

, 2YA).