So it will be a full stop for the telegram in India from July 15. The form of communication that has been part of India’s heritage since 1850 has lost its race to the smartphones, emails and SMSes.A circular issued by Shameem Akhtar, Senior General Manager (Telegraph Services) Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd’s (BSNL) Corporate office in New Delhi and sent to various telecom district and circle offices said that telegram services will be closed from 15 July and as a result all telegraph offices under the management of BSNL will have to stop booking telegrams from that day onwards. According to BSNL, it had asked the government to support the service as it was not commercially viable. There was a huge gap between the average annual revenue of around Rs 75 lakh it generated and cost of over Rs 100 crore it had to bear to run and manage it. But the government said the BSNL board should decide on it and after consultation with the Department of Posts, the decision was taken to close the service.
BSNL has instructed that surplus telegraph staff members would be deployed to mobile services, landline telephony, broadband services and shifting could take place within the next three months. Faced with declining revenues, the government had in May 2011, revised the telegram charges after a gap of 60 years. Two months ago, telegram services for overseas communication were withdrawn by BSNL. Within a short time of BSNL handling telegram services in 1990s, the PSU had a rift with the Department of Posts following which telegrams were accepted as phonograms from various villages and other centres from telephone consumers. This too had restrictions and embargo during certain hours.
Once the main source of sending alerts related to births, deaths and emergency situations, the telegram delivered both happy as well as sad news to people across the country. In several cases, telegrams were considered as official documents. Courts had accepted only telegrams and telegram receipts as proof of evidence in civil or criminal suits. It was also a handy mode of communication for jawans and armed forces for seeking leave, transfer or joining reports.
Before the advent of STD calls and the Internet, the telegram service was quite an essential tool for journalists. Reporters had special ‘Telegraph Cards’ and they would book telegrams to send news dispatches to their newsrooms. After the matter was booked, telegraph operators used to tap out the message across the wires.
The telegrams would then reach the destination post offices following which they would be delivered quickly to their newsrooms. American painter-turned inventor Samuel Morse sent the world’s first telegram, on May 24, 1844. He sent a message from Washington to his assistant Alfred Vail in Baltimore that read: “What hath God wrought?” Morse developed a working model of an electric telegraph, using crude materials such as a home-made battery and old clock-work gears between 1832 and 1837. He also acquired two partners to help him develop his telegraph: Leonard Gale, a professor of science at New York University, and Vail, who made available his mechanical skills and his family’s New Jersey iron works to help construct better telegraph models. Morse’s first telegraph device, unveiled in 1837, did use a one-wire system, which produced an EKG-like line on tickertape. The dips in the line had to be de-coded into letters and numbers using a dictionary composed by Morse, this assuming that the pen or pencil wrote clearly, which did not always happen.
By the following year he had developed an improved system, having created a dot-and-dash code that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits. (His assistant Vail has been credited by Franklin T. Pope—later a partner of Thomas Edison—with inventing this “dots and dashes” version). This coding system was significantly better, as it did not require printing or decoding, but could be “sound read” by operators. In 1838, at an exhibition of his telegraph in New York, Morse transmitted ten words per minute using the Morse code that would become standard throughout the world.
The first experimental electric telegraph line in India was started between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour in 1850 and next year it was opened for the use of the British East India Company. In 1854 the services were opened for public. Its use in India was pioneered by William O’Shaughnessy, a surgeon and inventor. “O’Shaughnessy was apparently unaware of Morse’s work and used a different code to send a message by transmitting electric signals over long distances. Lord Dalhousie, the Governor of India, recognised the potential of telegrams and authorised O’Shaughnessy to build a 27-mile line near Calcutta. By 1856, the network stretched 4000 miles across the British Raj, connecting the strategically vital cities of Calcutta, Agra, Bombay, Peshawar, and Madras,” according to the UK Telegraph. “The next year, the telegram helped the British violently subdue the Indian Rebellion 1857, with one captured Indian soldier, on his way to the gallows, reportedly pointing at the telegram device and stating: ‘There is the accursed string that strangles us’.”
The newspaper says the telegram was the technological breakthrough that revolutionised communications across what was then the vast British Raj – expediting the East India Company’s total commercial dominance of India, helping to suppress the 1857 uprising and providing newspaper readers in Britain with regular updates from the Empire.
Besides normal communication, telegrams were also sometimes creative. Like author Oscar Wilde sent a telegram from Paris to his publisher in Britain asking how his new book was doing. His message read: “?” The publisher replied: “!” In a small booklet named “How to Write Telegrams Properly”, Nelson E Ross suggests on how to save words: “Naturally, there is a right way and a wrong way of wording telegrams. The right way is economical, the wrong way, wasteful. If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, words which might be omitted without impairing the sense of the message, the sender has been guilty of economic waste. Not only has he failed to add anything to his message, but he has slowed it up by increasing the time necessary to transmit it.” – PTI Feature
