Atelegram is a written or printed message, originally sent throughtelegraphy. The use of the telegrams was popular forsocial andbusiness correspondence in the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Even in thetelephone age, the telegram remained popular, and spawned its own style of writing that in turn persisted in other media. Telegram services still exist today, though the popularity has largely waned, replaced by other forms oftext communication.
Initially, telegrams were sent by anelectrical telegraph operator or telegrapher usingMorse code, or aprinting telegraph operator using plain text. Acablegram was a message sent by asubmarine telegraph cable,[1] often shortened to "cable" or "wire".[2] The suffix -gram is derived from ancient Greek:γραμμα (gramma), meaning something written, i.e. telegram means something written at a distance and cablegram means something written via a cable, whereas telegraph implies the process of writing at a distance.
A telegram service is a company or public entity that delivers telegrams directly to the recipient. Telegram services were inaugurated afterelectric telegraphy became available.
Historically, telegrams were sent between a network of interconnected telegraph offices. A person visiting a local telegraph office paid by the word to have a message telegraphed to another office and delivered to the addressee on a paper form.[3] Messages (i.e. telegrams) sent by telegraph could be delivered bytelegraph messenger faster than mail.[4] The electric telegraph freed communication from the time constraints ofpostal mail and revolutionized society and the global economy.[5]
A decline that began with the growth of the use of thetelephone[6] was briefly postponed by the rise of special occasion congratulatory telegrams. Traffic continued to grow between 1867 and 1893 despite the introduction of the telephone in this period.[7]
At their peak in 1929, an estimated 200 million telegrams were sent.[7]
In 1919, the Central Bureau for Registered Addresses was established in thefinancial district ofNew York City. The bureau was created to ease the growing problem of messages being delivered to the wrong recipients. To combat this issue, the bureau offered telegraph customers the option to register unique code names for their telegraph addresses. Customers were charged $2.50 per year per code. By 1934, 28,000 codes had been registered.[8][page needed]
Telegram services still operate in much of the world. However,e-mail andtext messaging have rendered telegrams obsolete in many countries, and the number of telegrams sent annually has been declining rapidly since the 1980s.[9][page needed] Where telegram services still exist, the transmission method between offices is no longer by telegraph, but bytelex orIP link.[10]
As telegrams have been traditionally charged by the word, messages were often abbreviated to pack information into the smallest possible number of words, in what came to be called "telegram style".
The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer.[11] According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters.[12] For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters.[12] At the end of the 19th century, the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.[12]
Adiplomatic telegram is a confidential communication between adiplomatic mission and theforeign ministry of its parent country.[13][2] These continue to be called telegrams or cables regardless of the method used for transmission.
(n.) 4. a telegram sent abroad, especially by submarine cable. (v.) 9. to send a message by submarine cable.
