Frederick G. Creed
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Frederick George Creed (6 October 1871 – 11 December 1957) was a
Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
inventor, who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He worked in the field of telecommunications, and is particularly remembered as a key figure in the development of the
teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initia ...
. He also played an early role in the development of
SWATH A small waterplane area twin hull, better known by the acronym SWATH, is a catamaran design that minimizes hull cross section area at the sea's surface. Minimizing the ship's volume near the surface area of the sea, where wave energy is located ...
vessels.


Early life

Creed was born in Mill Village, Nova Scotia, and at the age of 15 began his working life as a check boy for
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in
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, where he taught himself cable and landline telegraphy. He then worked for the Central and South American Telegraph and Cable Company in
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and
Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...
.


The teleprinter

Working in the company’s office in Iquique, Chile, he became tired of using hand-operated Morse keys and Wheatstone tape punches, and came up with the idea of a typewriter-style machine that would allow the operator to punch Morse code signals onto paper tape simply by pressing the appropriate character key. Creed quit his job and moved to
Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
, Scotland, where he began work in an old shed. Using an old typewriter bought from the
Sauchiehall Street Sauchiehall Street () is one of the main shopping streets in the Glasgow city centre, city centre of Glasgow, Scotland, along with Buchanan Street and Argyle Street, Glasgow, Argyle Street. Although commonly associated with the city centre, Sau ...
market, he created his first keyboard perforator, which used compressed air to punch the holes. He also created a reperforator (receiving perforator) and a printer. The reperforator punched incoming Morse signals onto paper tape and the printer decoded this tape to produce alphanumeric characters on plain paper. This was the origin of the Creed High Speed Automatic Printing System. Although told by
Lord Kelvin William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 182417 December 1907) was a British mathematician, Mathematical physics, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy (Glasgow), Professor of Natural Philoso ...
that "there is no future in that idea", Creed managed to secure an order for 12 machines from the British
General Post Office The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Before the Acts of Union 1707, it was the postal system of the Kingdom of England, established by Charles II in 1660. ...
in 1902. He opened a small factory in Glasgow in 1904. Two years later the ''
Glasgow Herald ''The Herald'' is a Scottish broadsheet newspaper founded in 1783. ''The Herald'' is the longest running national newspaper in the world and is the eighth oldest daily paper in the world. The title was simplified from ''The Glasgow Herald'' in ...
'' adopted the Creed system, claiming that it was three times faster than the rival Morse apparatus.Procter 2004 In 1909, in order to be closer to the Post Office headquarters in London, Creed moved along with 6 of his mechanics to
Croydon Croydon is a large town in south London, England, south of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Croydon, a local government district of Greater London. It is one of the largest commercial districts in Greater London, with an extensi ...
. Working with Danish telegraph engineer Harald Bille, he established Creed, Bille & Company Ltd. in 1912, with Bille as managing director. After Bille's death in a railway accident in 1916, his name was dropped from the company's title and it became simply
Creed & Company Creed & Company was a British telecommunications company founded by Frederick George Creed which was an important pioneer in the field of teleprinter machines. It was merged into the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) in ...
. Creed's system received a major boost that same year when the ''
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'' newspaper adopted it for daily transmission of the entire contents of its newspaper from London to Manchester. In 1913, the first experiments were made in high-speed telegraphy by radio transmission between the Croydon factory and Creed's home about away. However, the outbreak of
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
in 1914 diverted the company's activities to military equipment. In 1915, with production continually expanding, the company found its original premises inadequate and moved to
East Croydon East Croydon is a railway station and tram stop in Croydon, Greater London, England, and is located in Travelcard Zone 5. At from , it is one of the busiest non-terminal stations in London, and in the United Kingdom as a whole. It is one of t ...
. It spent most of World War I producing high-quality instruments, manufacturing facilities for which were very limited in the UK. Among the items produced were amplifiers,
spark-gap transmitter A spark-gap transmitter is an obsolete type of radio transmitter which generates radio waves by means of an electric spark."Radio Transmitters, Early" in Spark-gap transmitters were the first type of radio transmitter, and were the main type use ...
s, aircraft compasses, high-voltage generators, bomb release apparatus, and
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s for
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and
bomb A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the Exothermic process, exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-t ...
s. Following the War, in 1920 the
Press Association PA Media (formerly the Press Association) is a multimedia news agency, and the national news agency of the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is part of PA Media Group Limited, a private company with 26 shareholders, most of whom are national and re ...
set up a private news network using several hundred Creed teleprinters to serve practically every daily morning newspaper in the UK and for many years was the world's largest private teleprinter network. Other companies followed suit in Australia, Denmark, India, South Africa, and Sweden. In 1924 Creed entered the teleprinter field with their Model 1P, which was soon superseded by the improved Model 2P. In 1925 Creed acquired the patents for Donald Murray's
Murray code The Baudot code is an early character encoding for telegraphy invented by Émile Baudot in the 1870s. It was the predecessor to the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2), the most common teleprinter code in use until the advent of ASCII. ...
, a rationalised Baudot code, and it was used for their new Model 3 Tape Teleprinter of 1927. This machine printed received messages directly onto gummed paper tape at a rate of 65 words per minute and was the first combined start-stop transmitter-receiver teleprinter from Creed to enter mass production.


Later projects

In July 1928 Creed & Company became part of
IT&T ITT Inc., formerly ITT Corporation, is an American worldwide manufacturing company based in Stamford, Connecticut. The company produces specialty components for the aerospace, transportation, energy and industrial markets. ITT's three businesses ...
and Creed retired in 1930, turning his attention to other less successful projects, including a mid-Atlantic "Sea Drome", first patented in 1919, and an unsinkable boat. He invented the SWATH (small-waterplane-area twin hull) before 1938, when he presented it to the British Admiralty, and was awarded a
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for it in 1946. He died before it ever saw commercial development, the first vessel being launched by the Netherlands in 1968.


Death

Creed died at his home in Croydon in 1957 at the age of 86.


Commemoration

Creed's home at 20, Outram Road,
Addiscombe Addiscombe is an area of south London, England, within the London Borough of Croydon. It is located south of Charing Cross, and is situated north of Coombe and Selsdon, east of Croydon town centre, south of Woodside, and west of Shirley. Et ...
, East Croydon, is marked with a commemorative
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, and the front wall also features a stone carved logo of the Creed Company. The CCGS ''Frederick G. Creed'', a SWATH vessel, is named after him.


Family

Creed's first wife was the Scottish-born Jane "Jennie" Russell (1868/9–1945), whom he met in Chile and married in 1896. She died in 1945, having borne 4 children. In 1947, aged 75, he married as his second wife Valerie Leopoldine Gisella Layton, ''née'' Franzky (1906–1994). One of his sons from his first marriage, Gavin L. Creed, was a minor poet. During World War II, while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Gavin Creed published ''For Freedom'' (1942).Doull Books, Halifax:
For Freedom
', (about)


Notes


References

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External links


Croydon Connections




{{DEFAULTSORT:Creed, Frederick G. 1871 births 1957 deaths Canadian inventors Canadian people of Irish descent People from Queens County, Nova Scotia