75th Anniversary -- Pioneering Change
Working for several thousand newspapers and broadcast stations throughout the world, all with varied deadlines and demands, Unipressers long have been accustomed to pressure.
"For such men and women there's a deadline every minute," wrote Joe Alex Morris in his history of the service's first 50 years.
To meet these deadlines UPI often has been in the forefront of technological advances in communications.
With ever-changing technology, the language changed, too.
Pony, TTS, Unistox, Unitype, Unifax, Unifax II, DataNews and IS&R are sprinkled throughout the service's history.
From the 10,000 words delivered each day by Morse telegraph in 1907, computers in a sparkling new $10.5 million technical center in Dallas now handle up to 13 million words daily. UPI stories are bounced off satellites, as are UPI Audio news and feature programs.
------ PHOTO: Study in contrasts: United press newsroom in the old World Building in New York in the early 1920s, with Karl Bickel standing at center, Hugh Baillie to his left. UP shifted to 220 East 42nd Street in 1931 and did not move again for 50 years. In 1981 UPI changed floors in the same building, moving into sleek, modern facilities custom designed for UPI's needs (above) ------
Newspictures were a rarity in newspapers when United Press was founded, but the invention of the halftone engraving process changed this. The forerunners of UPI Newspictures restored to airplanes and speedboats to gain precious hours over rivals. Today, the race to be first with photos is just as hot, but the transmission time has been narrowed to minutes from virtually any spot in the world for sharp back and white as well as lifelike color pictures.
UPI and its first customers quickly became unhappy with the telegraph reports which were either copied by Morse operators at the newspapers or delivered in brief telegrams.
UP bureaus began arranging conference calls among several newspapers in the same region and dictating terse stories twice a day, sometimes with a late call for last-minute bulletins. Known as Public News Transmission (PNT), it was quickly dubbed the "Pony" report.
Those on the receiving end of the calls were regularly saluted for their typing speed. One man who took Pony calls, Herbert Honey of the Hartford City, Ind., News, apologized one day to the Indianapolis "sender" for delays he had caused.
"I swallowed a chew of tobacco and I've been in agony ever since," Honey explained.
By the 1930s, teleprinters, tapping out stories in all capital letters had made Morse and the Poney obsolete.
------ PHOTOS: Unifax I picture receiver (left) gave way to Unifax II in 1975. UPI's latest version of the 16-S photo transmitter (below, right) sends color as well as black and white. ------
In 1951, United Press was a pioneer in the use of the Teletypesetter, which delivered hyphenated and column-justified stories with the capitalization where needed. The same signal produced a paper TTS tapethat could be fed into typesetting machines.
UPI took its first step into the computer age in 1963 with stock market reports. Electronically-tabulated lists of New York and American Stock Exchange quotations were first sent on Jan. 23, 1963. The service was called Unistox.
In the late 1960s UPI embarked on its most ambitious undertaking yet -- a worldwide "electronic newsroom."
------ PHOTO: UPI's Newspicture headquarters in New York features the first "Digital Darkroom," a computer facility that allows editors to electronically store, route, crop and enhance photos. A seond Digital Darkroom will be installed in Brussels. ------
Some thought it sounded like science fiction, but the idea made sense: Link UPI's bureaus into a set of computers, then utilize Video Display Terminals to edit the copy and send it to UPI's subscribers.
A. Mims Thomason, UPI's president from 1962 to 1972, announced awarding of a $1 million contract in 1970 for the first stages of the Information Storage and Retrieval System -- IS&R.
Two years later, on March 6, 1972, the first VDTs went on line in New York, soon joined by Washington and Chicago, site of UPI's National Broadcast Desk. The system subsequently was extended throughout the U.S. and reached Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and Canada, enabling UPI staffers to file copy at 1,200 words per minute. UPI used the technology to develop stock market services and customized news wires that went to subscribers at similar speeds.
Foreign bureaus like London, once restricted to a few hundred words per day by cable (at 5 cents each from London; it was $2.19 in Shanghai) could now send thousands.
The history of UPI Newspictures was every bit as impressive.
The first photograph of the Wright Brothers' flying machine in flight was distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), owned by Scripps, which later would establish Acme Newspictures.
In 1903 when that first picture of the airplane was distributed, there was no telephoto system. Pictures were engraved, converted to lightweight cardboard mats, and distributed by mail or courier. Newspapers published them days or weeks after the event. It took a full month for a picture of Captain Dreyfus to reach American newspapers from the scene of his famous trial in France.
In 1910, when Teddy Roosevelt returned to New York from an African safari, NEA photographers developed their shipboard pictures in a portable darkroom in the back of a speeding truck.
By 1936 Acme had developed its own telephoto equipment, starting a tradition of in-house design and manufacturing that persists to this day at UPI Newspictures.
Acme first tested its new equipment at the two 1936 presidential nominating conventions. Carrier pigeons were used as backstops. A storm forced down one flight of birds, but fortunately the Telephoto machines worked.
Photographic recording materials were costly, only affordable to the larger dailies. But soon after purchasing Acme, United Press introduced a new method of recording pictures automatically on an inexpensive electrolytic paper: Called Unifax, the service soon reached a network of newspapers in more than 400 cities.
Newspicture engineers continued to improve UPI transmitters, culminating with the 1971 introduction of the 16-S, which quickly became the standard for the industry worldwide.
UPI introduced the first electrostatic photo receiver, and called it Unifax II, in 1974. Picture quality was dramatically improved and since the process did not use silver, paper costs remained stable despite fluctuations in silver prices. UPI adapted Unifax II to receive GOES and other weather pictures from satellites, and Unifax II is today widely used by television meteorologists and others.
As UPI entered the 1980s, the methods to meet the "deadline every minute" were a far cry from the Acme editors who used homing pigeons as a backstop and the Indiana editor who held up the news because he swallowed his chaw.
------ PHOTO: "The guidelines of the wire service business are simple; truly objective reporting, readable, fast and complete. We are in effect photographers of the world scene, and usually no retouching is necessary. We want to tell what happened, not necessarily our opinion of what it means; we can safely leave that to the editorial pages and to the news analysts." -- Frank H. Bartholomew ------