Plaintext in black, translations in red, uncertain or possibly mutilated words in brackets [ ].

Whinfad cables We can accumulate more June delivery It is difficult say what To do yet As it will depend upon action manipulators New York Cotton Exchange very strict classification making contracts later on desirable property We do not know whether squeeze will come or not Weld [ide] may be reversing old straddle They are not doing anything much If market declines 1/4 to 3/8 think low cotton will sell as good cotton seems exhausted except at high prices George M. McFadden better.

comments

Whinfad is code for an (unidentified) individual or office in the McFadden operation. From other cablegrams found with this example in the same Cable Code, it appears to date from 1902, when George McFadden was in England (London and Karlsbad). The group of cablegrams also includes penciled drafts of cablegrams, and copies of sent cablegrams. The received messages do not appear to have taken full advantage of the compressions available from the code. The messages concerned weather conditions in Texas, prices and the state of the market generally; none were for actual transactions.

George H McFadden & Bro. was a large cotton factor with offices in New York and Philadelphia, and agents operating in the South (a Mr A Wood in Arkansas, for example); Zerega was a New York-based cotton trader shipping cotton to Liverpool.

Lower case output from tape (not page) printer.

Page printers would triumph for teletype purposes — particularly for news — but tape printers would survive very long. Donald Murray, a proponent of page printers, explains that for the U.S. case, there are special reasons in favour of tape-printing, which do not apply in the case of Government administrations. There is sharp competition between the Western Union and the Postal Telegraph companies, and the Western Union prefers not to send out messages with visible corrections. Consequently, messages containing errors have to be retransmitted. This occasions loss of time and labour, which is avoided with tape-printing, as errors in tape can be cut out so as not to show in the finished message. There is also a considerable percentage of time in transmitting the signals to run the typewriter carriage back and turn up to a new line, and at the end of messages time must be given to the printer attendant to turn up to a new message form for printing the next telegram. (Murray, "Speeding up the Telegraphs." IEE Journal 69:333 (March 1925): p 270)