An end to the era of telegrams

Though it survived and even flourished during its 125 years in Thailand, the telegraphy system is being given a fond farewell at Bangkok's main post office today

Published on April 30, 2008

How does one explain what a telegram really is to today's mobile phone-toting teenagers?

Let's try anyway: It's like an SMS message transmitted over landlines or radio frequencies, except, instead of the recipient getting it almost instantaneously, the message is decoded and printed on a piece of paper at the post office nearest to where the recipient lives.

The telegram is then put in an envelope, and delivered by a postman, a process that takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on the distance and accessibility. However, virtually every square inch of the country was covered and our postmen could be relied upon to deliver the telegrams without fail.

Invented by Samuel Morse in the 1830s, the telegraph system had technical advantages and became a commercial success.

Telegraphy came to Siam in 1875, but the service was not open to the public until 1883, when it started to bring glad tidings and news of catastrophes.

An enduring system

Telegraphy survived long after other long-distance communication technologies, including the telephone, became the norm, simply because it had written records. However, the proliferation of fax machines and e-mails sounded the death knell for the system.

In its heyday in Thailand, the telegraph system hit a peak of 8.32 million deliveries in 1985. Since then, the number of telegrams sent dwindled to about 100 a day.

But there's a reason for this.

Every thumb-twiddling youth routinely sends and receives several SMS messages on a daily basis at little or no extra cost, compared to the Bt1 per word for telegram.

Clearly, the telegraph system is no longer feasible and Thailand Post will be sending out its last batch of telegrams today in a commemorative event at the General Post Office in Bangrak to bid farewell to a means of communication that had served us well.

As a proper send-off, people are invited to send a last telegram to old-timers, or the first telegram to those born in the digital era.

These should serve as a memento of an invention that changed the world and its means of communication in a huge way.

After all, telegraphy started out as electrical pulses that travelled through landlines and evolved into a wireless system that is the harbinger of all of today's complex, yet much quicker communication systems.