Awesome effing machine

We’ve been getting excited about teletypes and making machines talk to each other.  But nothing quite describes the 1930s beauty (that Matt got for $1 on Ebay…. plus $100 for shipping) quite like the pictures.  Behold the Teletype:

We spent about 4 hours tonight cleaning it up and figuring out how it worked before we downloaded the manual for assurance that our conjunctures were correct.  This machine is electro-mechanical with a big emphasis on the mechanical.  It has a relay, a massive lightbulb looking fuse, a solenoid, massive AC motor, and more mechanical parts that any of us have seen on a communicatory device in a long time.  It’s peices have been banged up a bit, but having figured out the mecanics of it, we’re pretty sure we can get it up and running with some possible minor welding.

The clicks and sounds and gears were quite satisfying! And we did get the motor powered up tonight – here’s a video of it:

teletype motor

More glorius pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/littlegreenfroggy/sets/72157607651690722/