Origin and history of Teletype

"machine for mechanical writing printing by the impress of types arranged to strike one at a time onto a moving sheet," by 1868 in patent applications, from type (n.) + writer.

It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. [Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," 1950]

Among the old slang names for it was office-piano (by 1942).

"a communication system of teletypewriters," 1932, from first elements of Teletype exchange.

before vowels properly tel-, word-forming element of Greek origin meaning "far, far off, operating over distance," from Greek tēle "far off, afar, at or to a distance," related to teleos (genitive telos) "end, goal, completion, result" (from PIE root *kwel- (2) "far" in space or time).

The element also could mean "telegraph" by mid-19c. (teleprinter); "telephone" by late 19c. (telecopier), "television" by 1928 (tele-talkie, "motion picture broadcast by television"); and "by electronic means" by 1981 (teleshopping, originally hypothetical).