“Telegram serious, start immediately - 163-year-old messenger of bad and good news faces
death on July 15”
The report
continues:
“The Indian guillotine will fall on the Calcutta-born, 163-year-old
mode of communication on July 15 — giving end-game enthusiasts the opportunity
to vie for the honour of sending out the last telegram.
“We have taken a decision to close the service
after consultation with the department of posts (which once ran the service).
They also said there were better options available,” said an official of BSNL
that took over the operation in 1994.
The move
was clearly coming. Two months ago, BSNL had withdrawn telegram services for
overseas communication.
In a way
it’s symbolic that the @ of the email, and the “grbld gibrsh” of the SMS have
ruffed Morse’s dots and dashes.
Officials
said the 1980s were the golden years of the service in India as more than 100,000 telegrams per day
were sent and received only in the Delhi
Telegraphy has a long history: it started
with the use of smoke signals and then graduated to semaphore, the flag
language that allowed messages to be relayed between ships or buildings that
were far apart.
But all that changed when Samuel Morse
sent what is thought to be the first telegram, on May 24, 1844. Morse sent a
message from Washington to his assistant
Alfred Vail in Baltimore
The
telegram became popular for its speed and the ability to communicate momentous
news with remarkable brevity. But you can’t beat Irish author Oscar Wilde for
initiating what must rank as the shortest communication using the telegram. He
was living in Paris and he cabled his publisher
in Britain
The service came to India in 1850 when 24-year-old Irishman William
Brooke O’ Shaughnessy, a surgeon by profession, was appointed by East India
Company to lay down the country’s first telegraph line between Calcutta
and Diamond Harbour
The line allowed transmission of
electric signals over long distances. Leveraging on the tactical advantage that
the telegraph services could provide, the British East India Company decided to
expand its reach to cover about 4,000 miles connecting important cities like Calcutta , Agra , Chennai and
Bangalore
Indians were quick to use the telegram
and, over the years, a number of momentous pronouncements were made using the
service.
The champions of the telegram — if
there are any around — will surely hope that they could use the famous words of
Mark Twain when he learnt that his obituary had been published in the US London
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.””
