ON JULY 15th 2013 India became the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. The first message sent by telegraph in India was in 1850, and the direct descendant of that service is now in the hands of BSNL, a state-run telecoms operator, which says it is no longer economically viable given the plunging cost and growing availability of mobile phones. In Britain, telegrams were replaced by Telemessages, which were simply telegrams printed out and put into the post, in 1982. America’s telegram service, operated by Western Union, ended in 2006. Australia shut down its telegram service in 2011. Are telegrams dead?
Not quite. The venerable technology still clings to life, and not just in India. The telegraph dates back to the 1790s, when Claude Chappe, a French inventor, built a mechanical device, consisting of moving arms mounted on a tower, for sending messages quickly over long distances. In the 1840s such mechanical telegraphs gave way to electrical telegraphs, which sent messages as coded pulses along wires, and the word “telegram” emerged shortly afterwards to describe a message sent by telegraph. The invention of the telephone in the 1870s did not result in the immediate decline of the telegram, because the technical difficulty and expense of making long-distance phone calls meant that telegrams were still the easiest way to send international messages quickly. But as long-distance telephony became cheaper and easier, it was only a matter of time. From the 1970s, the emergence of electronic means of communication, starting with the fax machine, and then followed by e-mail and mobile-phone text messages in the 1990s, relegated telegrams to ceremonial uses such as messages relating to births, marriages and deaths.