Figure this: The Last Post

Come July 15,the humble telegraph or telegram will stop offering its services in India. Terse and cheap,telegrams were a precursor to the telephone,fax,printer and the Twitter age. Having long outlived their utility,the dashes and the dots have given way to shares and hashtags

Story of the telegram

350 BC: Aeneas Tacticus,a Greek writer,invented the hydraulic telegraph. This was used during the First Punic War fought between Carthage and Rome to ferry messages between Sicily and Carthage. Identical vessels,each with floating rods attached to corks,were placed at predetermined spots. Both the sender and receiver would release water when signalled. As the water went down,so would the rods,each marked with a series of messages.

1794: The first optical telegraph or semaphore telegraph was invented by Claude Chappe. The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches between France and Austria. The Paris to Strasbourg line had 50 stations; it took 9 minutes to pass through 15 stations. Earlier semaphore signals included beacons,flaring lights and reflecting surfaces.

1816: English inventor Francis Ronalds built the first working electrostatic telegraph.

1848: The Associated Press was founded in New York to reduce telegraph costs of six competitive newspapers.

1850: Irish surgeon in the Bengal Army strung the first Indian telegraph line along a 43-km stretch from Alipore to Diamond Harbour in Calcutta. In the next few years,the network would be 6,400 km long. The crescent-shaped network travelled from Calcutta to Agra,then south to Bombay and to Madras on the east coast.

1851: Telegraph engineers lay the first telegraph cable between England and France.

1861: Western Union builds first transcontinental telegraph line.

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1900: 63,168,000 telegrams sent and received in the US. More than 132,800 km of wires. By 1900,most of the First World is connected by telegraph.

1902: Telegraph across the Pacific completed,world encircled

1913: Eight messages could be transmitted simultaneously,submitting 80-90 words a minute.

1936: A single wire could carry 72 transmissions at a time

2000s: Most countries stopped telegram services in the 2000sMalaysia in 2012,Australia in 2011,Nepal in 2009,US in 2006,UK in 2003.

Still alive IN8230;

Bahrain. A more formal mode of communication than email or fax. News of death or importance still conveyed by telegram

Belgium,Canada,Mexico,

Russia,Slovenia,Switzerland

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Japan. It runs a telegram service for special occasionsfunerals,weddings etc.

Famous Telegrams

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

Samuel F B Morse,father of the electric telegraph,1844

SOS SOS CQD CQD TITANIC. WE ARE SINKING FAST. PASSENGERS ARE

BEING PUT INTO BOATS

Titanic on April 15,1912,in its last wire

ITS A BOY

Edward Teller,father of the hydrogen bomb,to Los Alamos,a classified laboratory for nuclear weapons,on the first hydrogen bomb

Shortest telegram

by Oscar Wilde far left and Victor Hugo. They sent question marks to their publishers,enquiring on the sales of their works.

The Zimmermann Telegram

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Believed to be the reason for the US joining WWI. On January 17,1917,Berlin sent a telegram,the Zimmermann telegram,to Mexico,urging them to join the German cause. The British intercepted the coded message and shared it with the US,giving then President Woodrow Wilson enough reason to rally support for joining the war.