It is a major effort today to keep pace with the rapid advances in the field of printed communications. Hardly a day passes that we do not read of a new development in equipment that is more complex, farther reaching, more rapid in operation.... This electrical, or electronic, transmission and interchange of the printed word might be said to be an evolvement of the old printing telegraph systems. Such systems, over the years, while not so rapidly as today, were also improved upon, modified, speeded up, but could be used only in the point-to-point transmission of messages. While the railroads had been using the Morse code system (key and sounder) satisfactorily, they would have preferred a system whereby a printed record could be obtained. In the industrial world, too, there was need for a businessman’s printing telegraph—a means to type out messages, directly and interchangeably, to far-off associates. And there was always that dream, starting with the earliest telegraph experimenters, of being able to correspond instantly with one another anywhere in the world. Indeed, the need for all this had been known for many years, but not the way. It was after the turn of the century that telegraph engineers began in earnest to think about a system of telegraphy that would permit direct intercommunication by the printed word, and direct circuit connection to any outlying subscriber as in the telephone communication system. Up until then, apparatus for transmitting telegrams, such as that of Wheatstone & Cooke, Morse, Hughes, Barclay, etc., also the step-by-step stock tickers and bulletin printers, used various types of code-signaling devices in which the code varied in length as to the transmission of more frequent or less frequent letters. Now in order to provide a practical telegraph system permitting the interconnection of apparatus throughout the world, the first basic requisite is a standard signaling code; this code, moreover, must be of such nature as to use the simplest form of electrical signaling (such as make and break signals, or positive and negative signals), and the code should be of equal length for all characters.