The Purpose of Mystery Object 40.9.11

Upvote:0

This looks like the printer for a receiver of high-speed code transmissions, probably marking the paper with electrical impulses. But this is only one component of a system, and might be as little as just the paper feeder.

Upvote:1

Here's an excerpt from Kadin2048's answer to this question at ask.metafilter.com, making a reasonable summation if we consider the wire recording (Wiki) techniques that were known at the time:

What I think is more likely, is that the tape was just colored in dark and light patches or stripes, and that it was decoded manually. As the tape went through the 'reader' device, the light reflected from the tape probably just illuminated a window, and a human had to decode it just like they would have decoded Morse code. (The Germans had their own dot-dash code similar to Morse, but not exactly the same.) It was probably itself encoded and meaningless to the person doing the transcription. They would have simply transmitted it onwards, and the final decoding to meaningful instructions would have happened in the actual U-boats.

Upvote:6

The object in question is a blank spool of recording tape for a multiplex photographic recording system. Such systems were commonly used not only at Sayville, but at all transatlantic radio receiving stations. The way the systems worked is that a photographically sensitive tape was fed into a galvanometrically modulated exposer and then immediately developed, essentially making a picture of the Morse code dash-dot sequence received by the radio. This is what a developed tape looked like:

multiplex tape

Here is an example of records of transmissions from various European stations, including the Nauen, Germany, station:

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All receiving stations used such systems, not just the German one at Sayville. The example above is from the Bar Harbor station operated by the US Navy, for instance.

The box itself is a light-tight case (notice the red window) in which the undeveloped film is stored on a reel. By opening the box in a lighted room you ruined the film.

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