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Telekrypton
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TELEKRYPTON
Telekrypton's early history is well expressed in these extracts from British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945 (London: St. Ermin's 1998), which covers Telekrypton and the beginnings of Rockex.
"In a paper published in 1926, an American engineer, G.S. Vernam, pointed out that it would not be difficult to convert a standard teleprinter into a cyphering machine. His theory was that the five-unit electrical impulses produced by a teleprinter, when directly connected with a wire, could be mixed at the moment of transmission with a second series of impulses to give a third and meaningless series. This last would appear upon the receiving teleprinter as a mere jumble of characters unless the second series of impulses were removed before the message was printed. It was, in effect, the principle that A plus B equals C and that C minus B produces A once more - the familiar principle of the one-time recyphering table. Vernam had shown how this could be applied by transmitting the impulses produced from a piece of five-unit teleprinter tape, perforated at random, simultaneously with an en clair message. At the opposite end of the wire the jumbled impulses were filtered through an identical piece of perforated tape and reappeared as en clair characters upon the receiving teleprinter.
telekrypton.jpg
Telekrypton photo from the book BEST-KEPT SECRET by John Bryden. (Virginia Military Institute, George Marshall Library, Lexington, Virginia).
The idea was sound, and the Western Union Telegraph Company had gone so far as to manufacture a limited amount of the equipment necessary for Vernam’s cyphering process. However, it had no commercial success, and in December 1941, two Telekrypton cyphering machines (such was the trade name) were still lying in the Western Union warehouse.

In many respects the Western Union Telekrypton was well suited to BSC’s (British Security Coordination) need for secure local communication between Washington and New York. It had, however, two weaknesses. The code tape, which consisted of a string of random teleprinter characters, was joined at the ends to form a loop. This loop ran through the transmitter continuously as a message was being sent, and, although the mélange which passed down the wire was impressive, it would not have given much difficulty to a cryptographer. Secondly, the machines were far too complex for their purpose and would obviously be difficult to keep in running order.