Tag Archives: telegraph key

06.28.24
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STOP THE PRESSES, AGAIN

Gentle Reader, here we are again—this time with a new, new update.

As a devotee of this site, you no doubt recall my post of May 7, 2019. It featured the curious curio pictured above—a telegraph key that looks like . . . well, like something else.

It is a Foote, Pierson & Co. Twentieth Century key, put on the market in 1901 and widely known as a “speed handle” or “pump handle key.” It came down to me as a family heirloom from my grandfather, William P. Sommers, who was a railroad telegrapher. The odd-looking device was one inventive response to a work-related stress injury known as telegrapher’s paralysis—which I innocently supposed to be just another name for carpal tunnel syndrome. 

Oops!

After an email from David Pennes, a physician in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I stand corrected.

Penne has been tracking this historical affliction of railroad telegraphers for years and is just about to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Telegrapher’s paralysis, says Penne, was not carpal tunnel syndrome. It was either (1) task-specific dystonia or (2) compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. Maybe a combination of the two.

This diagnosis took a lot of detective work, because as Penne points out, “[t]he condition was never described in medical journals of the day.” 

Lacking such professional data, he says, “I used a database of 60,000 searchable .pdf pages from the union and trade publications, whatever medical literature was out there, and was able to track down a handful of individuals who either had the condition or worked with people who did, which put a human face on it.” 

In the course of his research, Penne encountered my 2019 post erroneously equating telegrapher’s paralysis with carpal tunnel syndrome. He also ran across a fleeting reference to my grandfather in a 1901 publication from the Order of Railroad Telegraphers—a sort of fraternal guild Grandpa Sommers once belonged to. I have his membership card somewhere.

Penne’s email correspondence with me straightened out another point as well. I had assumed that Grandpa had the key in his possession because the railroad let him take it with him when he left their employ. In fact, Penne says, “Anyone working for the railroad wishing to use anything other than the employer-supplied straight key had to buy their own.”

So Grandpa must have owned the key outright, having laid out the heavy sum of $8.95.

Why?

But that raises another conundrum. In 1901, when the Twentieth Century Key experienced its brief surge of popularity, Grandpa would have been only seventeen years old—having worked as a railroad telegrapher since age fourteen. Three years’ work would not have included enough tappings of the standard telegraph key to give him telegrapher’s paralysis, whether task-specific dystonia or compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. So why did he buy it? 

Well, you had to know Grandpa. He came from a technological family, had the highest regard for his own brains, and was apt to back anything he considered a good idea—or a sound, well-engineered solution to a problem—even if it cost good money. Things he bought over his lifetime included a Pierce-Arrow Touring Car, several Studebakers, lots of fractional partnerships in oil-drilling operations, and a weird ultraviolet light device imagined to cure rheumatism.

He would have been aware of the old operators’ complaints about “telegrapher’s wrist.” Thus, he took a flyer on a new key—one that might spare him the anguish suffered by others.

All this is supposition, of course. And every once in a while, Your New Favorite Writer is reminded that he ought to beware of suppositions. 

Not every sore wrist is carpal tunnel syndrome. 

Whatever your calling, Dear Reader, take care of your digits. One day you’ll grow old and you’ll need them to keep on buttoning your buttons.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.07.19
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Stop the presses! Mystery Object Revealed!!

Last week, I asked you to guess the identity of the object below:

Foote, Pierson & Co. “Twentieth Century” telegraph key, popularly known as a “Pump Handle Key,” Serial Number 197. ©Larry F. Sommers, 2012.

That’s right, it’s a telegraph key. 

“Why doesn’t it look like a telegraph key?” you ask. Maybe you think a telegraph key should look like this:

Telegraph key. Lou Sander, Public Domain.

Yes, indeed it should—and that’s the problem. 

Samuel F. B. Morse invented electric telegraphy in 1844. In the ensuing years, telegraph keys—those little gadgets telegraphers used to send messages in Morse code over wires before the telephone, teletype, and Internet were invented—were mostly of the type shown in Lou Sander’s image above. The devices required a repetitive up-and-down motion of the hand to send the dots and dashes that composed the message.

As this new technology spread rapidly around the globe, men and women were soon spending whole careers “pounding brass” eight hours a day, five or six days a week—employed by railroads, military organizations, and other operations that needed to transmit information quickly over long distances. By around 1900, manufacturers started producing telegraph keys with horizontal or lateral actions to combat “telegrapher’s paralysis,” a repetitive motion injury that today we call “carpal tunnel syndrome.” 

One answer to this challenge was J.H. Bunnell & Company’s Double Speed Key, introduced in 1904. This key, known as “the Sideswiper” for its horizontal action, looked very similar to a standard telegraph key, but the lever was mounted for sideways operation. It became a very popular item in Bunnell’s inventory.

Priority, however, goes to Foote, Pierson & Company with their “Twentieth Century Key,” also known as the “Pump Handle Key,” introduced at the very turn of the century, in 1900. The motion of this device was rotational: The operator swung the handle up and to the left to make contact. Professor Tom Perera of Montclair State University tells us this key was “Popular with Railroad operators.”

That’s probably the reason I happen to own the Twentieth Century Key shown in my teaser photo at the top of this post. It came down from my grandfather, William P. Sommers, who was a young railroad telegrapher and station agent in the early years of the twentieth century. The “pump handle” of this device today is quite stiff, but I suppose that’s a matter of congealed lubricants. Even assuming fresh lubricants and a smoothly operating handle, it’s hard to imagine Grandpa sending with any speed while using such a cumbersome wrist-twisting motion to send the signals. 

But the very nature of that wrist motion presumably spared the operator’s carpal tunnels and made the key “popular with railroad operators.”  Even so, I suppose by the time Grandpa left the employ of the railroad, his “Twentieth Century Key” was an obsolete relic, superseded by the sleek Bunnell “Sideswipers.” That is what allows me to think the railroad would have let him take the outmoded key with him as a souvenir of his railroad days. 

Grandpa was a fierce, truculent, and eccentric man. He was also a stickler for propriety. He would never have simply stolen railroad property.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author