The Economist explains

Are telegrams dead?

Not quite. They cling on in the form of novelty messages and modern digital forms

By T.S.

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.

In India, the telegram held on a bit longer because it was used for internal government communications. The peak year was 1985, when 60m telegrams were sent, according to BSNL. But since then the number has dropped, and the number of telegram offices in India has fallen from 45,000 to just 75. (For several years telegrams have in fact been transmitted between offices in the form of e-mails, which are then printed out.) Yet even after the shut-down of India’s official service, telegrams survive in a few other countries, including Belgium, Japan and Sweden, where former telecoms monopolies maintain them as a nostalgic novelty service. And in many other countries private firms offer telegram-delivery services. So despite several recentreports to the contrary, the telegram is not quite dead, and will probably never die.

Moreover, in some ways the tradition of the telegram is healthier than ever. Around 20 trillion short messages, tapped out on mobile phones, and sent either as SMS text messages or over internet-based services such as WhatsApp, were sent in 2013. Tweets, like text messages, also require users to keep their missives brief and telegraphic. Such digital messages have undermined the business case for the telegram, but have preserved aspects of telegraphic tradition. Nokia mobile phones used to announce incoming text messages with three short beeps, two long ones, and three short ones: the letters SMS spelled out in Morse code, the international alphabet of telegraphy. The 19th-century technology of the telegram lives on, in spirit at least, in our 21st-century devices.

This piece was updated on December 2nd 2015 to change tenses in the first line.

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