Telegraph Service

This service came to an end in India yesterday after functioning for about 163 years.

This service is used to communicate a message in short form and majorly used for Birth / Death information, Arrival / Departure and Marriage Greeting by common man. Also this service was widely used by politicians and unionist people to send their demand to officers.

During the time I joined job, this service was used to send leave letter to office and it was treated as a legal document (Pray leave. Medical Certificate follows.)

You can hear the Morse Code sound in the Telegraph office continuously and I was wondering how they understand the message.  During my JE training in DoT, I had an opportunity to learn this Morse Code for 60 hours and I became an expert to some extent.  One has to closely listen the “Dot” / “Dash” and the interval between the characters to make the letter/word.

To facilitate general public and to reduce the cost, Greeting telegrams were standardized with some numeric number and one can just mention the number against which greeting message will be sent.

Later in 1986 all manual telegraph services were modernized with new technology SFMS (Stored Forward Messaging System). By this system, a person is not needed all the time in the receiving end as system will store the message and will deliver to the end office when he login.

Technology revolution, invention of SMS and Email, eradicated this technology.

One of telegram I received. Just to see the look of a telegram