Arturo Camacho
Eltech 153
12-16-01
Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot was born on 1845, in Magneux, France.  Baudot was
the principal engineer of the Posts and Telegraphs of France.  He was
working on a way to improve the efficiency of the then very slow telegraphic
transmission.  He had to overcome many difficulties, especially the
avoidance of timing errors between phases of transmission and reception.  In
1874 he devised a printing telegraph machine that used a typewriter style
keyboard, this allowed virtually anyone to send and receive telegraph
messages.  Baudot received a patent on a telegraph code that by the mid-20th
century had supplanted Morse Code as the most commonly used telegraphic
alphabet.  The Baudot code came to be known as the International Telegraph
Code No. 1.  Baudot used a different type of code for his system because
Morse code didn't lend itself to automation; this was due to the uneven
length and size of bits required for each letter.  Baudot used a five-bit
code to represent each character, each character is preceded by a start bit
and followed by a stop bit it is an asynchronous code, this would normally
only give 32 possible combinations (00000 to 11111 = 32).  The five-bit code
conserved bandwidth, although it meant that shifting between letters and
other characters such as numbers and punctuation marks required sending
characters that indicated a shift was taking place.  Now he had 62
combinations for letters, figures and punctuation marks.  To this day, the
speed of serial communications is still measured in Baud rate, in Baudot’s
honor.  Modern versions of the Baudot Code usually use groups of seven or
eight "on" and "off" signals.  Groups of seven permit transmission of 128
characters; with groups of eight, one member may be used for error
correction or other function, and the Baudot Code is a predecessor to ASCII.
  Baudot also invented, in 1894, a distributor system for simultaneous,
multiplexing, transmission of several messages on the same telegraphic
circuits or channel Baudot died on March 28 at Sceaux, France, near Paris,
at the age of fifty-seven, after a long time illness.