IN 1925, A new telegraph technology was developed by the Eastern Telegraph Company. This was known as ‘regeneration’, a means of automatically cleaning up and strengthening the often weak and distorted telegraph signals received by remote stations on major cable chains. Prior to this, at each station staff received and manually retransmitted signals onto the next section of cable.
With regeneration, many of these staff were no longer required, resulting in many redundancies between 1931 and 1933. Notice of redundancy was received via telegrams known as D/N, (‘D bar N’) the code under which they were sent out from head office. The other effect of ‘regeneration’ was to enable the telegraph service to compete more effectively with radio telegrams, which were taking much of the traffic which had formerly travelled by cable.
