Jean Maurice Émile Baudot was born in Magneux (Haute-Marne) France, on 11th of September, 1845. He was the son of a rural farmer and only received a basic schooling, he spent his teens and early 20s working on his fathers' farm.
In 1870, aged 24, Jean entered the Administration of Telegraph Lines that he was seduced by science. He decided to perfect his general education, he had everything to learn in electricity and in mechanics as he had had no prior schooling in these subjects!
Being avidly interested in his work as an engineer at the French Telecommunications Service, Jean started working on a way to improve the efficiency of the,at the time, very slow telegraphic transmission system. He had to overcome many difficulties, especially the avoidance of timing errors between phases of transmission and reception. Finally he developed what was called "The Baudot Printing Telegraph". Today it would be called a synchronous time division multiplex system. Jean invented his telegraph code in 1870 and by 1874 or 1875 (various sources give both dates) he had also perfected the electro-mechanical hardware to send and receive his code. His inventions were based on certain printing details from the Hughes Instrument, invented by Bernard Meyer in 1871, and the five unit code devised by Gauss and Weber. Jean combined these, together with original ideas of his own, to produce the final multiplex system.
The Baudot system was accepted by the French administration in 1875. The first on-line tests of his system took place between Paris and Bordeaux on November 12, 1877. At the end of 1877, the Paris-Rome line (about 1700 km) began to be served by a double Baudot telegraph system. The first telegrams transmitted were those announcing the election of M. Carnot to the presidency of the French Republic.The Baudot apparatus installed at the Universal Exhibition of 1878 won him the great gold medal and the unanimous congratulations of the engineers of the entire world.
Promoted to Controller in 1880, after the sucesses of his system, he had the ambition to become an Inspector-Engineer. Without neglecting his work and without being frightened of the difficulties that it gave him to surmount, he prepared for the test and took it with success. He was named Inspector-Engineer in 1882.
In July, 1887, Jean undertook successful tests between Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, and Waterville, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the Atlantic Telegraph cable of the "Commercial" Company; the apparatus experimented with was a double Baudot installed in duplex. The Baudot transmitters and receivers were substituted for the equipment that was already in use.
The Baudot telegraph system was employed progressively in France, and then in other countries. Italy was the first to introduce it, in 1887, in its interior service. Holland, in 1895, Switzerland in 1896, Austria and Brasil in 1897, England in 1898, Germany in 1900, Russia in 1904, the British Indies in 1905, Spain in 1906, Belgium in 1909, the Republic of Argentina in 1912, and Romania in 1913. The British Post Office also adopted the Baudot system for a simplex circuit between London and Paris in 1897.
On January 3 1894 he served, with a triple apparatus, the underground wires from Paris to Bordeaux that functioned painfully with the Hughes telegraph system. On April 27, 1894, he established, again over a single wire, communications between the Paris stock exchange and the Milan stock exchange and at the same time between central Paris and central Milan and invented, for this occasion, the retransmitter.
In all this time Jean solved, with his apparatus, the most varied and the most interesting problems. However, Jean had little help from the French Telegraph Administration to improve his system. Very often he had to find the financial source for his research in his own pocket. For example, in 1880 he sold his great gold medal received on the International Exhibition of Paris in 1878 to perform further research on the telegraphy!
After a long spell of illness Jean Maurice Émile Baudot died on March 28, 1903, at Sceaux, near Paris, France, at the age of 57. His legacy to the world was his code that was modified in 1901 by Donald Murry and continued in use until the 1950s.
The Baudot code was the first truly digital code, unlike Morse code that uses on, off and timing, Baudot code consists of only two states, both logically and electrically. Logically, the only states are "1" and "0". Today we call the unit that can have these two logical states a "bit". Electrically, the states are current flowing ("on" or "1"), and no current flowing ("off" or "0"). Each Baudot character consists of 5 bits. Two logical states and five bits allows 32 characters. Baudot needed 26 characters for the alphabet, 10 for numbers, and more for miscellaneous characters. In order to increase the number of characters, he used two special characters, LTRS and FIGS, to give a total of 64 possibilities. LTRS (11111) precedes Alphabetic characters. FIGS (11011) precedes numerical and special characters such as punctuation. In 1874 he 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. The usual speed of operation was 30 words per minute.
Some of the Honours and Recognitions bestowed on Jean Maurice Émile Baudot:
Around 1930, the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee introduced the International Telegraphy Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) code as an international standard, which was based on the Western Union code with some minor changes. The US standardised on a version of ITA2 called the American Teletypewriter code (USTTY) which was the basis for 5-bit teletype codes until the debut of 7-bit ASCII in 1963. ITA2 is still used in TDDs and some amateur radio applications, such as radioteletype (RTTY) and is often, incorrectly, referred to as "Baudot code" although it is significantly different from Baudots' original. Baudots' original code was sent from a manual keyboard and no teleprinter equipment was ever constructed that used it in its original form.