Why 17 Million Telegrams Are Still Sent Every Year

if I've learned anything from my YouTube comment section it's that human beings love to communicate nowadays we have more ways to communicate than ever apart from the good old-fashioned vocal cords emails are the most common form of communication with 74 trillion sent every single year that's 202 billion per day 2 million per second and all of them somehow end up in your mailbox next to email you have WhatsApp with 36 trillion WhatsApp messages per year then you've got 14 trillion WeChat messages 7 trillion texts 200 billion tweets 109 billion Zoom calls about five Yahoo messenger calls and somehow 17 million telegrams Yes you heard me right the world still sends millions of telegrams every single year that raises a few questions like who what when where why and how four of those are pretty easy to answer telegrams telegrams the world and now the remaining two who and why are a little more complicated to explain why such an old and outdated technology has managed to stick around while so many others like pagers dial-up modems and the iPhone 12 have all that disappeared you need to understand just how influential and widespread Telegraph systems really were you see when telegrams became publicly available they were a big deal in the early 1800s long distance communication was still slow and pretty unreliable apart from smoke signals flag signals and voice signals also sometimes called Yelling your only option for sending a message more than a few miles away was by mailing a letter and seeing as postal systems didn't have access to trucks planes or until the mid 19th century even trains those letters didn't travel quickly if you wanted to slide into a fair maiden's DMS from another city your message could take weeks to arrive enough time for her to get swept off her feed by another man get married and then get swept off her feet Again by tuberculosis if you were flirting abroad it could take months and you'd probably have to send a few copies of your message too since letters were so frequently lost this famously is what inspired Samuel Morse to implement a new long-distance community education system in the United States and for receiving a letter informing him that his wife was sick he traveled home to Connecticut only to discover that she had already been buried the electric Telegraph a niche technology used in the UK for Railway signaling seemed like the perfect solution sending electrical impulses across wires made long-distance communication almost instantaneous and you didn't have to worry about your Saucy words ending up at the bottom of the Atlantic so in the 1840s Moore set out to develop a national network and design a new Telegraph language to decode the electrical impulses into words that way he could be their first wife the next time she died but the 1850s telegrams were all the rage with 12 000 miles or 19 000 kilometers of cable in the United States alone and the very first undersea cable connecting North America and Europe across the Atlantic this network changed basically everything it made it possible to sync up clocks around the world and finally create standardized time zones it led to the creation of National Stock markets and it transformed news reporting from a mostly local Affair to something National or even International giving people a new sense of global awareness that eventually made everyone really depressed and unlike most outdated Technologies the telegraph had no competition for decades it was the only way to communicate long distance governments businesses and financial institutions all had to redesign themselves around the Telegraph and so I promise I'll get to this in a second that's basically why they still exist today now in 2006 Western Union the largest telegram company in the United States announced it was shutting down its telegram service which a lot of news outlets falsely reported was the end of the telegram then in 2013 India's state-run telegram service shut down which the news outlets decided was a great opportunity to not do any research again and declare this the definitively for real end of the telegram it turns out though that dozens of countries still have working telegram systems and there are dozens of companies that still get by and pay the bills on their very defensive websites by only delivering telegrams in the United States for example Western Union's remaining network was handed over to a company called itelegram which still sends telegrams internationally for about 30 bucks but why well there are a few reasons you might want to send a telegram in 2021 in the United States at least telegrams have been around long enough that they've worked their way into the dusty old laws and protocols that haven't yet caught up to the 21st century or the 20th century for that matter some contracts for example still have Clauses that require are written notices and telegrams can be much faster than traditional letters that's because by law a telegram is effective the moment it's filed with a telegram company the timestamp on a telegram is considered synonymous with a postmark from the post office you might also want to send a telegram if you're worried your message will be challenged in court something like a contract cancellation or message that says I am so not going to kill my husband tonight telegrams are legally recognized documents and tend to hold up in court better than emails or text messages mostly because telegram companies keep records for seven years and can vouch for you as a third party which Apple or Google or Facebook could probably do if they weren't too busy using those records to sell you a Peloton the remainder of modern telegrams are generally sent for special occasions like weddings or funerals since they don't take much effort but kind of seem like they do so after you're done proving that you didn't kill your husband in court you can send yourself another telegram as consolation of course sending yourself a 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Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 1,383,114

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Id: TyN07jKXJ3o

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021