On July 15th India will become the latest country to shut down its official telegram service. 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 honorable technology still clings to life, and not just in India. The mechanical telegraph dates back to the 1790s. 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, restricted 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. Even after the shut-down of India’s official service, the telegram survives in a few other countries, including Belgium, Japan and Sweden, where it was kept as a nostalgic (怀旧的) service. And in many other countries private firms offer telegram-delivery services. So despite several recent reports 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. Tweets, like text messages, also require users to keep their messages brief and telegraphic. Such digital messages have undermined the business case for the telegram, but have preserved aspects of telegraphic tradition. Some mobile phones used to announce incoming text messages with beeps that sound like 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. Which of the following is the first country try to end its telegram service