Belgium ends 19th-Century telegram service | Hacker News Reader

Belgium ends 19th-Century telegram service

bbc.co.uk

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The German post offers fake telegrams: They can be sent via telephone or internet (incl. CSV upload for mass spendings) and will be delivered by regular mail. If entered till 3am it will be delivered on the same day. 160 characters for 12.90€. https://www.deutschepost.de/de/t/telegramm.html

It's the same in Italy [1]. Until just a few years ago it was still somewhat used in special circumstances (wedding, death of friend/relative) to send a formal message when you could not be present in person.

[1] https://www.poste.it/gamma/telegrammi.html

We used to have that in Sweden as well, but it seems like it was discontinued a few years ago.

Only for hardcore hipsters.

Oh, that's so tacky.

The service was offered on things like trains and cruise-ships and of all the miraculous things, you could send actual money through it as well. Sounds like a pretty magical service for the 1930s. There were even photos and drawings over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto

Hence the idiom ”to wire [money]”.

In general terms, transferring funds via ACH is over a wire (or perhaps more specifically, a fiber optic filament) as well.

Ever heard of Western Union, the company that does money orders? They were the big telegraph company a century ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_union

When I was young, I sometimes got birthday telegrams from my uncle. I loved them - only a single sentence in all caps.

So I am feeling a little bit nostalgic right now. But, of course, I would not want that world back - where you had to pay a small fortune to "instantly" deliver a short message.

And "instantly" meant within a few hours, not milliseconds like today.

I remember getting one -1- telegram. (Received for my Confirmation from a distant relative in the US. Must have been May 1993.)

This was such an event in the cottage I lived in at the time that the local postmaster dropped by on his way home from work to deliver it, rather than just toss it in the mail for delivery next day (as was SoP, if I remember correctly - I seem to remember telegrams were telexed from whatever entity served as the national gateway to the nearmost post office, where it was printed and put in local mail; this procedure was written out in the phone books, and provided for a glimpse into an exotic world for a kid stuck in West Podunk, Norway in the eighties...)

Still get a chuckle out of it, as my relative (who had emigrated from Norway as a kid, and thus spoke Norwegian) had apparently gamed the system a bit - in order to pay for fewer words, he'd strung multiple words together like 'CONGRATULATIONSON THEBIGDAYMAY GOD BLESSALL'

(Wonder how that worked out - presumably foreign language text was billed at a higher rate?)

> in order to pay for fewer words, he'd strung multiple words together

I remember reading [1] that nineteenth century telegraph users could buy popular code books that allowed them to save money by substituting single words for common phrases. Obviously both parties needed to use the same code book, and unsurprisingly the telegraph companies tried to ban the practice.

[1] I think this was in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. A very interesting read btw.

The same technique is still used by stenotypists.

Some years ago, I read a newspaper story about a blind stenotypist who records the proceedings at the Saxonian parliament. He said that he uses a set of a few thousand abbreviations specifically designed for parliament speeches. Then someone takes his papertrail and expands the abbreviations into the actual proceedings.

The practice was also used in shorthand. In addition to being a phonetic transcription, the secretary would also utilize standard abbreviations and contractions to keep up with the spoken word. The documents would then be sent to a secretarial pool of typists who would transcribe it to long-hand. Schools would train secretaries to write their shorthand identically, so that it was legible to other secretaries and the abbreviations were universally understood.

Think about it - people were already using digital compression techniques in the 1800s!

Historically, telegrams are billed per character, nowadays they are probably just transmitted over internet anyways, the only difference is the time it has to be delivered.

I know of Russian system they still have it, only difference from a letter is that regular telegram will be delivered in 8-12 hours and urgent in 4 hours.

Currently with everyone having a mobile phone there is a lot less demand, sending an sms will be faster anyways.

In the UK they were billed by the word : http://www.1900s.org.uk/images-1930s40s-postal-rates.htm has a scan of a 1930s/40s tariff which is 6p for 9 words, extra 1p for every word beyond that, and extra 6p per mile you were outside a 3 mile radius of the destination post office.

A few years ago when I worked for BT I met a retired guy who had started as a telegram boy at age 14 - apparently every morning they had to line up for inspection.

Hi,

Thanks - that makes a lot of sense. (Maybe the operator at the sending end had problems deciphering the handwriting on the form?

Or were you instructed to write in block letters, perhaps even with a single character in each box, to ensure maximum readability? Presumably there was a standard form used by all members of the ITU or something? Call it a common interface, if you like?)

I've always assumed that the slightly garbled text was an attempt at shaving a little off the fee; I almost feel a little sad to hear that may not have been the case at all. :)

Image of form for sending a UK telegram: http://www.images.stamp-collectors-network.net/large_images/... -- no boxes. Running words together will only work in a foreign language, the clerk would notice if you tried it in English and charge you for the number of words actually used.

Was the message sent in norwegian from the US? In that case, depending on the actual infrastructure it had to travel through, it would have been transcribed at least once, probably more than once, by operators that did not know norwegian, and thus had no intuition for where the spaces went.

Yup - it was sent in Norwegian from the US.

However, it was sent as late as 1993, so I would assume (without having any expertise on that kind of thing!) that 'sending a telegram' simply meant that upon you filling in the required forms, someone typed the text on a terminal or even in an application on a general-purpose computer before the text magically appeared in Norway, to be printed and hand-carried to your home, a very cumbersome solution to the last mile problem. :)

(Now I am curious; I'll be off to Google later tonight - just when did the telegram service stop relying on actual telegraphy?)

The backing technology would probably have been telex. This seems to have superseded morse-telegraphs some time in the 1960s, and the US telegram office (Western Union), if they had a connection, should have been able to telex directly to your local Norwegian post office.

Completely wild and unqualified guess: Western Union probably did not run their US operations over telex in 1993, they probably had some 80s-era green-screen mainframe system, which did not connect to the world wide telex network (because telegrams, especially international ones, were a microscopic part of traffic -- anyone with any kind of significant international traffic would have their own telex-links, or be on the phone, fax and/or email by then). So the operator would have typed the message (from a hand-written form, the customer would probably not have had hands-on-keyboard) into this system (first transcription), addressed to some central office in charge of sending world wide telegrams. The office would have telex, but not integrated, so they'd print out the message and re-type it on the telex (second transcription), sent directly to your local post office. There, they would take the message directly from the telex and deliver it to you (so no transcription on the Norwegian end, at which point the spacing would have been fixed).

In the early 1980s, the oil drilling company I worked for still used Telex extensively to communicate with our various offices around the world. The procedure was that you'd fill out a form by hand and stick it in inter-office mail for delivery to our communications center in the building. In about a day, you'd get back the teletype response.

My mother was working in a hotel booking office in the 70s, and they routinely communicated with travel agents around the world by telex. It was a really impressively comprehensive network, but largely invisible to "regular" people.

Likewise, I received a few congratulation telegrams upon my marriage long ago, and still got some for condolences for my mother's death in 2013. The telegram service was discontinued here in 2014 due to low demand (even then the transport had for long been actually something different from morse code over dedicated cables.).

I remember the anecdote about ending the use of a Morse code only distress channel by the Coast Guard. On the last day, the land based radio operators spent the time sending each other Shakespeare quotes and similar until they received an actual emergency distress call! Seems a small cargo ship had lost a lot of systems - including rudder control - and were forced to use the Morse channel to ask for help.

I am always sad to hear that another part of history dies out. I'm not sure why, since I've never in my life used a telegram, but it's somehow representative of an age that is no more. Including anything from steam engines, trains, intercontinental ship travel and a whole range of things that have long since been improved on, but which I'm still sad to see go.

Intercontinental ship travel has not entirely died out. Well, for pure transportation it largely has, but for tourism or entertainment you can frequently find intercontinental legs on cruise ship voyages. These are not routinely offered and usually occur when the ship itself needs to sail between continents.

Because these voyages have multiple consecutive days at sea with no land activities, they are usually considered less desirable than cruises that dock every day in port. As much as there is to do (relatively) on big ships, most passengers get bored. Those of us who enjoy solace and contemplation can enjoy the time however.

On modern cruise ships, all of these journeys are fast and uneventful, what with weather radar and forecast, fast travel speeds, and stabilizers that nearly eliminate rolling motion in calm waters. Plus satellite Internet and often cellular phone connections. So they rarely ever have the drama that we imagine from a century ago.

You can also book rooms on some container ships (yes, container ship cruises are a thing!).

The downsides of such a cruise are readily apparent: Lack of amenities during the cruise, few to no people to talk to/with (unless you know the common language of the crew - which could be almost anything - but even then, they have work to do!), etc.

You are also limited on where you can travel from and to, and of course when you arrive at your destination, you probably have to get creative to gain transport from there to wherever.

There's also the fact that you won't usually have a set and known time for when to board the ship for leaving (it might be in port and scheduled to leave at a certain time, but might be held up for one reason or another outside of the port, or delayed leaving for some reason or another), or when it will arrive at its destination (like any ship, I suppose - but container ships are working vessels, and they may be held out of port for certain admin purposes, or some other law-related reason, or they may have to dock elsewhere for repairs - or who knows what else).

That all said, from what I have investigated, if you want a little (or a potentially a lot) of adventure, and don't mind the whole uncertainness of the experience, container ship cruising can be a very inexpensive (compared to a regular cruise ship). I don't think it compares to flying (but I never delved that deep into the pricing), but it certainly could be worth it from an "about my vacation" story perspective.

The last time I had a look at this the cost was $130 per day. This seemed a tad on the expensive side for a trip that could take a few weeks.

> These are not routinely offered and usually occur when the ship itself needs to sail between continents.

I actually looked into this a few weeks ago, and it turns out there are HUNDREDS of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific sailings each year. Most of the major cruise lines offer them. I was surprised.

Though most of the transatlantic crossings are cruises with multiple stops. e.g. Norwegian Cruise Lines goes from Florida to France by way of the Azores.

AFAIK (although I'm by no means an expert), the Queen Mary 2 is the only ship that's specifically an ocean liner. The various cruise lines also apparently reposition boats between seasons though and there are non-stop crossings to accommodate that need.

Cunard's Queen Mary 2 still does regularly scheduled transatlantic ocean liner runs between NYC and Southampton for part of the year (in addition to cruises). I don't know of any other ocean liners that routinely do this sort of thing.

I've thought of giving it a try at some point but the dates have never lined up for a London trip.

Telegraphy didn't die out. It evolved into the internet. (The internet did not spring from nothing.)

Kinda.

The net itself do not have much in common with telegraphy, but many of the early computers that ran it were operated by a device that came out of the improvements to telegraphy.

Yes, the teletype terminal, or TTY.

That's right. Also keep in mind that the telegraph system was a digital network. It's pretty clear that evolving into the internet was inevitable, as telegraphy had outgrown the abilities of manual operators.

> steam engines, trains, intercontinental ship travel and a whole range of things

Trains? Trains haven't died out. What are you on about?

I was specifically thinking about the strange sort of charm that a steam belching monster has. But as other people have stated, it's also about anything but air travel being either slower, more expensive and less available.

Right but commuter trains and trains for up to a few hundred miles are still widely popular. In some places most people commute by train.

There are countries (like the U.S.) where long-distance train travel is impractical compared to catching a plane or simply driving. This becomes especially obvious when considered in stark contrast with Europe, Japan or even gasp Russia.

Travel isn't always about what's practical.

I take the train instead of a plane within the U.S. whenever possible. Most commonly between Chicago and Seattle, Seattle and Vancouver or Los Angeles, and Los Angeles and Houston.

If you define popularity by capacity, in my experience long-distance train travel is very popular in the United States. It is VERY rare that I take one of these trips when the sleeping cars ("first class"), business class[0] (when offered), and often even coach, aren't completely full.

[0] Except the runs between Chicago and Saint Louis, where I'm often the only person is business class, when business class is offered.

It is much more practical to fly to pretty much any destination in Europe, or to drive their by car, than it is to take the train - often it is cheaper too.

However the trains still run, so you can absolutely do it.

Telegrams are SMS of pre-mobile era.

SEND NUDES STOP

This image shows the worldwide wiring map in 1891 for those interested:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/1891_Tel...

And many of the same paths are today used for fiber optics.

That's so true! I hadn't thought of that, but you're right.

I rememeber us getting a telegram from an aunt who lived abroad in the 70s. The local post office phoned us with the message and the written telegram itself was delivered by the postman, next day. I kept it for awhile.

From the article:

Just 10 businesses and a handful of individual customers have kept the Belgian system going until now. It has been chiefly used by bailiffs, who had need of a system which provided legal guarantees of dispatch and receipt.

Would email programs supporting PGP fill this role?

We all use www.telegram.org nowadays.

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