Arthur Zimmermann's Ticker-tape Machine

Origin
Arthur Zimmermann - (1864 - 1940) was State Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the German Empire. Two and a half years into World War I, the United States had maintained a status of neutrality while the Allied forces had been fighting those of the Central Powers in the trenches of northern France and Belgium. Understanding that when German submarines started to sink US merchant ships to cut supply lines Zimmermann needed to come up with certain methods to prevent such a massive power to enter the war against his nation. One attempt had be a three times coded message to Venustiano Carranza, President of Mexico at the time, to join Germany in the war and launch an attack against America to keep them tied up. In exchange for their aid Germany would give back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico. Carranza knew that it would only cause future problems to attack the US and declined the team up. Sending back the reply was when British codebreaker intercepted the message and broke it. Soon after the United States entered WWI with the Allied Forces.

Effects
The messages that are received on January 16th 1917 is repeated daily, due to being the same thing every day the only effect is learning more about a single day in the past and creating a mess under the pillar it is sitting on.

Collection
There are thirty different attempts to break the code and see if the messages are different but so far no change. Starting at 6 am the machine spits out the coded message that provides information for four hours. Never runs out of tape but needs to be cleaned otherwise the tape will begin to pile up.

Trivia
The messages that are received on January 16th 1917 is as follows: "--Three hours of sleep before woken by volley of explosives -- High alert breakfast -- Clean self, clean weapons, clean area in trench -- Dinner --Sleep and downtime -- Returned fire for thirty minutes -- High Alert an hour before dusk -- Dig trenches closer to Allied machine gun turret"