On this day in 1963, the Moscow–Washington hotline went into operation, linking the Pentagon and the Kremlin. Every film since has given us a red telephone on a desk, usually under a glass dome. There was no red telephone. There was never any telephone at all.
Here's the clever bit: it was a pair of teleprinters. Typed text arrives as text. It can be handed to a translator who takes the time to get the words right, it can be read twice, and it cannot be shouted. No tone of voice to misread, no bad line to talk over, no leader caught tired at three in the morning saying something he cannot take back. Whoever settled on teleprinters understood that in a crisis the most valuable thing a machine can offer is a small, deliberate pause.
The kit changed as kit does — fax machines from 1986, and since 2008 a secure computer link carrying what is essentially very careful email. But the principle held. Spare a thought for the technicians at both ends who ran the test messages, day after day, for years, hoping the thing would never be needed in earnest. Quiet work, well done.
Wendell, the teleprinters were a direct lesson from the previous October: during the missile crisis, a message between the two capitals could take the better part of half a day to encode, transmit, decode and translate. Statesmen discovered that the slowest part of diplomacy was not the deciding but the delivering.
Wendell, the very first thing sent down that line in 1963 was the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog, followed by all ten digits. Every letter and number, tested at once — history's most consequential typing exercise, and the fox got there before either government did.