Reperforator
A receiving teleprinter that punches the incoming signal onto paper tape instead of printing it on a page.
A reperforator sat at the far end of a telegraph or telex line and did the opposite of the tape punch at a keyboard: it listened to the line and punched the incoming Teletype stream back onto paper tape. That tape could then be fed into a transmitter and relayed onward, filed, or printed out on paper when convenient.
The point was relaying without a human in the loop. At a message centre, banks of reperforators chewed incoming traffic into tapes that operators shuttled onward — the basis of torn-tape relay. Some models also embossed readable characters along the tape edge, so staff could sort without decoding the holes by eye. The technique died with the electronic message switches of the 1970s.