The MKV Fuller Phone
When I was on vacation earlier this summer I saw one of these in the Yellow Barn Museum in the Shenandoah Valley and decided to do a post on it.
Algernon Clement Fuller was part of the British Royal Corps of Engineers during WWI. While serving in the Corps, he invented the Fullerphone. You were not able to speak into the Fullerphone for it transmitted Morse code only. What made the phone special though, was that the Germans could not intercept messages sent from it. This was achieved by the two phone operators synchronizing their buzzers. This worked as a simple scrambling mechanism which the Germans could not make sense of. You were also able to operate the phone while wearing a gas mask which made it possible to be used in the trenches. Another nice feature of the Fullerphone was its ability to still transmit messages when the wire connecting the two phones was damaged or severed (if the line was severed and the two ends were touching the ground near each other the messages could still transmit).
I found a website where they discuss Fullerphones in some detail. It includes a page on the German version of the Fullerphone. It says it was so similar to the British Fullerphone that it could be used to communicate with it, but they don't know if the Germans copied it or developed it independently.
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