DEATH OF THE TELEGRAM

 This is how “The Telegraph” of Calcutta dated 13 June 2013 announced the demise of the telegram which will take place on July 15, 2013:

“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 Two months ago, BSNL had withdrawn telegram services for overseas communication.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.

India has decided to scrap the telegram about seven years after Western Union in the US put an end to its famous service in 2006. Curiously, Western Union, the company that was specifically formed in 1855 to exploit the white-hot technology of that era, made the announcement in the same understated manner that went unnoticed for a week.

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 main office. Now it’s barely 100,000 a day — nationally.

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 that read: “What hath God wrought?”

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 to ask how his new book was doing. The message read: “?” The publisher cabled back: “!”

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, an important coastal point in the suburbs of the city.

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 by 1853.

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. He sent a telegram from London in 1897 saying: 

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.””