Western Union Sends Its Last Telegram

The era of the telegram, an icon of communication dating back 150 years, came to a quiet end last week. Western Union says it delivered its final telegram on Friday.

Lost and Found Sound

In truth, the telegram long ago succumbed to long distance telephones, faxes, e-mail and instant messaging. Even deliverers who sang them couldn't save telegrams from the dustbin of history. The fact that one final telegram was sent last Friday is a tribute not to the telegram's endurance, but to the glacial tediousness of extinction itself.

What will we remember of the telegram? Probably the prose style the economic of telegraphy engendered. Punctuation cost extra, so the word STOP substituted for a period. Otherwise, it was brevity in the extreme -- pronouns, verbs omitted.

The telegram made tabloid headline writers out of ordinary folks sending urgent messages. Sometimes those urgent messages contained the worst news, sometimes the best.

Tom Standage, author of The Victorian Internet, says telegrams were most popular in the 1920s and '30s, when they were cheaper than a long-distance call. But the telephone and e-mail eventually led to the extinction of the telegram.

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All About the Telegram Western Union History Invention of the Telegraph World War I: Zimmerman Telegram McCarthy Telegram to Truman (1950)

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