On this date: Western Union's last telegram (2024)

(WHTM) — It was the communication miracle of the 19th century.

On May 26, 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the message “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” from Washington to Baltimore using little jolts of electricity going through a wire.

The telegraph had come of age.

Contrary to common belief, Morse did not invent the telegraph. In England, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone created a system for the Great Western Railway in 1838. It used what’s called a needle telegraph, where electrical impulses move needles to point at letters on a display board. It worked well enough that needle telegraphs were used into the 20th century.

But Morse and his partner Alfred Vail came up with something better. Their telegraph, which created signals by tapping on a spring-loaded electrical switch (the telegraph “key”), was mechanically simpler and much cheaper to set up on a big scale.

As important as the telegraph was the code they developed to go with it. Morse Code was the “software” on which the early telecommunications industry was built. It turned letters and numbers into short electronic dots and longer electronic dashes. (Even if you know little if any Morse code, you’re probably aware that “dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot” spells out SOS, the international distress signal.) The code could be tapped out quickly, and written down by telegraph operators or printed out on “ticker tapes”. (If you search “Morse code chart” on the internet, you’ll find plenty of them.)

Telegraphy boomed. By 1850, there were 20 telegraph companies in the United States, some of which merged together in 1851 to form Western Union, the largest telegraph company in the country. By 1861 they’d built the first transcontinental telegraph line. In 1866 the Transatlantic cable connected the U.S. and Britain, and we were on our way to our modern wired world.

Telegrams developed a unique prose style called telegraphese. (Telegraph refers to the entire system; telegram was the printed-out message delivered to your door.) Since telegraph companies charged by the word, telegraphese tried to pack as much information into as few words as possible. For instance, instead of “We’re going to Philadelphia. We will meet you there.” a telegram might read “GOING TO PHILLY STOP MEET THERE STOP”. (Telegrams were all capital letters, and “STOP” became the preferred way of ending a sentence, particularly during the world wars, when misplaced punctuation could have disastrous consequences. It also became common practice to end news telegrams with the number 30. )

Telegrams reached their peak of popularity during the 1920s and 30s, even though the telephone had been around since the 1870s. The telegraph had a head start on its infrastructure, and for a long time, it actually cost less to send a telegram than make a long-distance phone call. It was also less tedious; a long-distance phone call could involve a series of operators connecting through multiple exchanges to manually make the connection.

But telephone service continued to improve. On Nov. 10, 1951, the first direct-diallong-distance telephone call in North America automatically made the connection between Englewood, New Jersey, and Alameda, California in about 18 seconds.

From then on telegraph use started to drop. Western Union, seeing the writing on the wall, re-invented itself as a national and international money transfer service. On January 27, 2006, the company sent out its last telegram.

That doesn’t mean the telegram is dead, however.

The International Telegram Company took over the Western Union service and is still delivering telegrams to this day. There are other telegram companies still operating across the world. The International Telegraph website says there are still 17 million telegrams being delivered every year. (By contrast, the site Oberlo.com states we average 347.3 billion emails per day.) Telegrams are still useful for some legal matters, and some people just think it’s cool to send somebody a telegram.

But while telegrams have become a minor link in our connected society, Morse Code is still very much with us. It’s still used for air navigation beacons, and amateur radio enthusiasts use Morse code on short-wave radios. Transmitting Morse requires much less power than voice messages, and the beeps and boops of code can be more easily heard through static and noise. And, you don’t even need electronics to send a message in Morse. People with disabilities have used Morse code to communicate by tapping or moving their fingers or feet-and you can literally send a message in the blink of an eye. It’s quite likely Morse code will be around long after the very last telegram is delivered.

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