The Globotype is a color display for telecommunication

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

s. It was invented and patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

ed by David McCallum of Stonehouse, Devon, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. The device features very low cost and does not use consumable supplies. It is Royal Letters Patent No. 2924 issued December 29, 1855. The design and coding used is described in Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, Volume 2, pages 461 and 462. Mr. McCallum invented the Globotype in response to the use of printing telegraph

Printing telegraph

The Printing Telegraph was invented by Royal Earl House in 1846.The device was made by linking two 28-key piano-style keyboards by wire. Each piano key represented a letter of the alphabet and when pressed caused the corresponding letter to print at the receiving end. A "shift" key gave each main...

 machines which he saw as both expensive and unneeded.

"They are all very ingeniously contrived ... but why attach such combersome expensive machinery for the purpose of printing the letters? If a message must be printed, why not have a man in the office do it? He will do it better than it can be done by galvanic power attached to a telegraph wire, etc. etc." -David McCallum

The inventor published a small booklet in 1856 entitled: GLOBOTYPE TELEGRAPH: A recording instrument in which small coloured balls are released one by one and made to pass over a series of inclined planes by the force of gravity. The booklet was originally published by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans of London.

It is cited and described in Froehlich/Kent Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, volume 2 pages 461 and 462.