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Comment by struppi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.).

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