How were telegrams delivered

Technology You Didn't Know Still Existed: The Telegram

The envelope for a Western Union Telegraph, c. 1861 (Photo: Library of Congress)

Today, where disposable instant messaging, emails, texts and tweets are all around us, it is a pleasant surprise to find out that the grandfather of quick communication is still with us.

Yes, it is still possible to send a personal, hand-delivered telegram.

A telegram sent to Atlas Obscura’s Editor-In-Chief from Luke Spencer on 22 May, 2015

On January 27th, 2006, the world’s most famous telegram agency Western Union announced that it “will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services..” For over 150 years the world’s greatest joys, deepest condolences and proudest successes had been hand delivered within their iconic yellow envelopes, written in its own distinctive brief prose.

At one point in the 1920s, Western Union and its army of uniformed messengers were sending more than 200 million telegrams every year. But the advent of faxes, then emails and finally SMS messaging saw the numbers dwindle, bringing to an end the golden age of the telegram.

But a handful of companies are carrying on the tradition. Principal amongst them is the International Telegram Company who inherited and still operate Western Union’s former telex and cablegram network. They are well aware of their own anachronism: “Most people are pretty surprised to learn that telegrams still exist, and in fact are still pretty widely used in some parts of the world,” says Colin Stone, Director of Operations. Overall, he says that about 20 million telegrams are still delivered every year.

And this isn’t just a gimmick; text messages and e-mails might work for saying hi but when it comes to urgent hand-delivered messages, the telegram is still the gold standard. “People use them for canceling contracts and sending legal notifications because a copy of the message is retained in our files for 7 years and can be legally verified,” explains Stone. Everything from legal notices to social correspondence for births, funerals and weddings are being routinely sent by telegrams. In the U.S., Stone says that people still send telegrams for a simple reason, echoing the famous quote about why humans climb Mount Everest—“because they can.”

Samuel Morse, c. 1840 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Prior to the invention of the telegraph, long distance communication was as slow as the horse which carried it; the Pony Express could deliver a message across America in roughly 10 days. This was obviously not ideal. In 1825, an aspiring painter was in Washington, D.C. working on a commissioned portrait of the famed French general Marquis de Lafayette when he got an urgent message from his father saying, “Your dear wife is convalescent.” Leaving the painting of Lafayette unfinished, the painter rushed home to New Haven, Connecticut, to find that his beloved wife was not only dead but had already been buried. He devoted himself to creating a faster method of long-distance communication, and would lend his name to an invention that deliver messages almost instantly; his name was Samuel Morse.

Morse learnt that over in England, inventors William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had installed the world’s first commercial telegraphy system on the Great Western Railway in 1838. Their patented system involved a series of needles that pointed to letters of the alphabet on a board, spelling out a message. Samuel Morse developed a single wire electrical telegraph that proved more simple and popular. Along with his assistant Alfred Vail, they created the Morse code signaling alphabet, and patented his electric telegraph to deliver it. In May 1844, Morse sent the ominous sounding message from the floor of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington to Baltimore, “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.”

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone’s electric telegraph from 1837, which is now held in the London Science Museum
(Photo: Geni/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4. 0)

Almost overnight telegraphs transformed the way the world communicated. In 1846 there was only Morse’s experimental line between Baltimore and Washington, but by 1850 there were 12,000 miles of cable and over 20 companies in the United States alone. Tom Standage, in his 1998 book The Victorian Internet, described how “it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime....romances blossomed over the wires and secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others.”

The method of sending a telegram was simple. By visiting the office of a telegraph company, or later, by over the telephone, you would compose a message as briefly as possible, for telegrams charged by the word. The message was then conveyed by the electric wire in Morse code to its destined office where it would be written or typed, stuck to a form and hand delivered, usually by a boy on a bicycle. If you were living in Pittsburgh in the 1850s it was entirely possible your telegram would have been delivered by a young Andrew Carnegie. Or over in Port Huron, Michigan, a boy of the name Thomas Edison.

A group of Western Union telegraph messengers in Norfolk, Virginia, photographed by Lewis Wickes Hine in 1911 (Photo: Library of Congress)

So prevalent was the number of aspiring cable companies, that Standage notes in the 1852 US Census, “the telegraph industry even merited 12 pages to itself.” One such company was the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. Gradually buying up its competitors, it would come to virtually monopolize the entire telegram industry under its new name, Western Union.

Known today principally as a money wiring service, Western Union was once the premier American telegraph operator. In 1861 it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in the U.S., instantly rendering the Pony Express obsolete. Such was its success that in 1884, it was one of the original 11 stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (The shareholders were no doubt delighted to read of their profits on the stock exchange ticker, especially as it was Western Union which had invented it. ) By 1930, Western Union had moved into an opulent example of art deco architecture on 60 Hudson Street, New York. With the tagline “Telegraph Capital of the World,” it came complete with over 70 million feet of cable, its own gymnasium and an auditorium for the instructing of messengers.

The Western Union Telegraph Building in New York City, photographed in 1931 (Photo: Library of Congress)

In 1854 in a house overlooking Gramercy Park, the industrialist, philanthropist and inventor of such varied creations as the first U.S. steam locomotive and Jell-O, Peter Cooper, met a prominent New York financier named Cyrus West Field. Together with a team of three other backers, including Samuel Morse, they created a 400-mile underwater telegraph line connecting Newfoundland with Nova Scotia. Three years later, West started laying the first telegraph wire along the Atlantic ocean floor.

A map of telegraph connections in 1891 from Stielers Hand Atlas (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Just 14 years after Morse’s first telegram, Queen Victoria sent a message of congratulations to President James Buchanan. The first transatlantic telegram was met with such hysteria in New York that impromptu parades and fireworks accidentally set fire to City Hall.

Photograph showing the White House telegraph office and staff during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, 1902 (Photo: Library of Congress)

It’s hard to imagine now, but the birth of the telegram transformed language as much as business. Just as instant messaging today has developed its own abbreviated lexicon of terms such as IRL, IMHO, and ICYMI, so to did telegraphy. Due to telegrams being priced by the word, brevity was the order of the day. Companies soon did a thriving business in publishing code word directories.

In one thrifty telegram comprising of the word COQUARUM the poor recipient would be reliably informed that the ‘engagement broken off.’ In business you might well ask someone to LOZENGE (“what shall we do with documents and bills of lading attached”) to which the stern reply GIGGLE would instruct, “Use your discretion as to delivery of documents. ”

AWestern Union telegram from 1930, announcing the Millsaps College beats MSU (then Mississippi A&M) in football
(Photo: NatalieMaynor/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

Soon a Hemingway-esque prose developed, with brief, terse sounding messages omitting expensive pronouns and adjectives. Guide books such as Nelson E. Ross’ 1928 How to Write Telegrams Properly had whole chapters devoted to “Extra Words and Their Avoidance”, and “How Unnecessary Words Creep In”.

Under the ethos that “Brevity is the soul of Telegraphy”, social formalities in letter writing such as “Dear Madame” and “Yours very truly” were quickly done away with. Shortness and pithiness were the order of the day. During the filming of The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the labyrinthine plot was so confusing that director Howard Hawks cabled author Raymond Chandler asking who killed the chauffeur. Chandler sent a simple telegram back— “NO IDEA”.

The shortest telegram exchange sent is attributed to Oscar Wilde. Living in Paris, he is supposed to have cabled his publisher in London to see how how his new book was doing. The telegram simply read “?” to which the reply cabled back was “!” (Although the story might be apocryphal; the same telegram has been attributed to Victor Hugo.)

While the majority of telegrams were used for everyday conversation and business, some are particularly poignant. Such as this desperate message telegraphed on the night of April 14th, 1912:

SOS SOS CQD CQD TITANIC. WE ARE SINKING FAST. PASSENGERS ARE BEING PUT INTO BOATS. TITANIC.

During wartime, the most dreaded telegram of all was hand delivered on behalf of either the War Department or the Navy Department. The message began “The Secretary of War (for soldiers and airmen) or Secretary of Navy (for sailors and marines), regrets to inform you that [name, rank and serial number of the man in the military service] was killed in action (or missing in action).”

Other telegrams changed world history. One of the most infamous was a telegram consisting of a secret message in groups of coded numbers that Western Union delivered to the German Ambassador to Mexico on January 19th, 1917. Sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman it was intercepted by British intelligence and sent to President Woodrow Wilson.

The Zimmerman telegram January 19, 1917 (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The telegram spelt out that Germany would offer US territories to Mexico in return for joining the German side. The telegram was published in the US press on March 1st, 1917, and a month later, despite Wilson being elected under the banner ‘He Kept Us Out of the War’, the United States declared war on Germany. In his book The Codebreakers, David Kahn rightly states that,”no other single cryptanalysis has had such enormous consequences......never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message.”

Telegrams may not be as widespread as they once were, but through companies such as the International Telegram Company they remain perhaps the most elegant way to send a message since 1844.

Telegram Passes Into History | WIRED

For more than 150 years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past.

The company formed in April 1856 to exploit the hot technology of the telegraph to send cross-country messages in less than a day. It is now focusing its attention on money transfers and other financial services, and delivered its final telegram on Friday.

"The decision was a hard decision because we're fully aware of our heritage," Victor Chayet, a company spokesman said Wednesday. "But it's the final transition from a communications company to a financial services company."

Several telegraph companies that eventually combined to become Western Union were founded in 1851. Western Union built its first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861.

"At the time it was as incredible and astonishing as the computer when it first came out," said Tom Noel, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "For people who could barely understand it, here you had the magic of the electric force traveling by wire across the country."

In 1994, Western Union Financial Services was acquired by First Financial Management Corp., which First Data Corp. bought for $7 billion the following year. Last week, First Data said it would spin Western Union off as a separate company.

Telegrams reached their peak popularity in the 1920s and 1930s when it was cheaper to send a telegram than to place a long distance telephone call. People would save money by using the word "stop" instead of periods to end sentences because punctuation was extra while the four character word was free.

Telegrams were used to announce the first flight in 1903 and the start of World War I. During World War II, the sight of a Western Union courier was feared because the War Department, the precursor to the Department of Defense, used the company to notify families of the death of their loved ones serving in the military, Chayet said.

With long distance rates dropping and different technologies for communicating evolving — including the internet — Western Union phased out couriers in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By last year, only 20,000 telegrams were sent at about $10 a message, mostly from companies using the service for formal notifications, Chayet said.

Last week, the last 10 telegrams included birthday wishes, condolences on the death of a loved one, notification of an emergency and several people trying to be the last to send a telegram.

"Recent generations didn't receive telegrams and didn't know you could send them," Chayet said.

Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code, sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore on May 26, 1844, to his partner Alfred Vail to usher in the telegram era that displaced the Pony Express. It read "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?"

"If he only knew," Chayet said of the myriad choices today, which includes text message on cell phones, the internet and virtually free long-distance calling rates.

"It definitely was an anachronism," Noel said. "It's amazing it survived this long."

The end of the era of telegrams

Telegrams were once the fastest way to send messages. But in the age of instant messengers and the Internet, this service is outdated.

End of an era: Deutsche Post stops telegram service at the end of the year. The service was barely used, a company spokesman said today, explaining the move. Deutsche Post follows the example of many other postal companies around the world. This was previously reported by the consumer portal Paketda and Die Welt.

Invented in 19century, the telegram was one of the fastest ways to transmit important information until the 20th century. A text dictated in person or over the telephone at a post or telegraph office was usually telexed to a post or telegraph office near the recipient and then delivered by messenger.

Since the price of a telegram was usually quite high and depended on the number of words, a particular style of language developed with short forms instead of full sentences. A typical wording was: "Come to your grandmother on Saturday at 8 pm." With the spread of the telephone, and even more so with the advent of the Internet and smartphones, the telegram has dramatically lost its significance. nine0003

High prices despite short texts

It has hardly been used by private customers lately, a postal spokesman said. Sometimes companies used it as a reminder or as a thank you to long-serving employees at company anniversaries, but even that was becoming increasingly rare.

But this is not surprising: telegram prices remained high despite the loss of importance. Mini-telegram up to 160 characters recently cost at least 12.57 euros, maxi-telegram up to 480 characters - 17.89euro - in a simple version. With a decorative sheet, the price was 21.98 euros.

Phone booths will also be permanently abolished

However, the telegram is not the only outdated telecommunications service that consumers in Germany will have to say goodbye to in the coming year.

At the end of January, Deutsche Telekom also switched off the last remaining pay phones, which it announced in October. Since the end of November, approximately 12,000 remaining devices cannot be paid in cash. At the end of January, the possibility of using telephone booths with the help of telephone cards will also cease. nine0003

The first telephone booth was installed in Berlin in 1881. At its peak, there were over 160,000 telephone booths in Germany. But over the past decades, they have gradually disappeared from the urban landscape, because almost no one used them, at the latest with the spread of mobile telephony.

Nearly one in three pay phones did not generate a single euro of revenue last year, Telekom reported in October. The average income per seat is also only a few euros per month. This is incommensurable with the maintenance costs. It will likely be 2025 before the last telephone poles and phone booths are removed, the company said. nine0003

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What were the telegrams like? About the ancient ancestor SMS | Technology and the Internet

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, during the time of Dumas and the Count of Monte Cristo, Claude Chappe's optical telegraph operated in France. The first line connected Paris and Lille. The length is 210 kilometers, the distance between the towers is about 3 km. The attendants did not even know what they were transmitting - they simply repeated the signal (sequence of signals) that they received from a neighbor. The first test of the new data transmission medium made a splash - the dispatch covered 210 km in just 3 hours. Telegraph lines began to build and the neighbors of France. A 1200 km long optical telegraph line Petersburg-Warsaw was built in Russia! nine0003

And then came the era of the electric telegraph. Telegrams transmitted in Morse code ran along the wires from one station to another. Faster than optical telegraph and much cheaper. The telegraph has become available to private individuals!

The telegram peddlers knocked on the door: “Open the telegram for you! Sign for receipt. Thank you. Goodbye!" Moreover, if a telegram-lightning came to the post office, then it was brought at night. A telegram covered a distance of hundreds, or even thousands of kilometers in ... In a very short time. nine0003

The exchange of telegrams between Vladivostok and St. Petersburg was carried out in a matter of hours. This is not for you months in a postal wagon and not weeks in a train car!

In 1911 an experiment was done. On August 20, a telegram was sent in New York with the text: "This telegram must run around the Earth." The telegram's route was more than 30,000 kilometers, it crossed 16 countries and returned to the device that transmitted it after 16 minutes. nine0003

Very quickly the telegraph became just a commercial enterprise. And the speed of delivery of telegrams began to depend on the type of telegram. A regular telegram was taken by a postman delivering mail. If there is a telegram, he will find the address, knock on the door, transmit the telegram, receive a receipt and go on about his business. If the telegram was late for his exit on the route, then you have to wait until he goes to deliver mail in his area next time. In general, you will receive a telegram tomorrow. There was also a lightning telegram. Upon receipt at the post office, they immediately took it and brought it to the specified address. Of course, it cost twice as much. nine0003

I read Bulgakov's "super-lightning". As I understand it, it was sent not by a postman on foot, but by a messenger on transport (I think on a motorcycle, but I'm not sure).

The process of transmitting telegrams has been improved all the time.

At first, a telegrapher sat at the machine and tapped with a key, passing the dashes and dots of Morse code, which, on the other side of the wire, tens of kilometers away, were read from the tape and translated into letters - in order to then transmit the text of the telegram to the messenger, or transmit the text further along the telegraph line by means of a telegraph. nine0003

Over time, the demand for messaging has increased tremendously. Automatic devices for sending and receiving telegraph messages were invented. The text of the telegram was typed on a perforator machine.

The telegraph operator pressed the buttons with letters, almost like on a typewriter, and a perforated paper tape ran out at the exit. This tape was inserted into the transmitting device, which, following the almost program punched on the tape, transmitted dots and dashes to the line. There was a decoder on the other end of the wire - it accepted dots and dashes, turning their sets into letters of the alphabet. The device tapped the resulting text on paper. nine0003

Telegrams at the post office can now be sent on a festive form, choosing from a large number of samples. Happy birthday, anniversary, or any holiday. It was possible to send a telegram in advance, so that it would then be delivered on a given day. And it was possible to send a lightning telegram - and it was delivered in a couple of hours to all cities of the USSR.

Time passed. Cell phones appeared, then the Internet appeared - and telegrams lost their relevance. SMS on a cell phone is much faster than any super lightning. And the Internet is not only much faster, but also provides not only communication, but even video communication. Where is the telegraph! nine0003

On January 27, 2006, the American company Western Union, which had been transmitting text messages over the telegraph for one and a half hundred years, stopped providing this service. And in Russia, everything is still the same, the Russian Post continues to send out telegrams.