Spend any amount of time perusing the blogosphere and you'll quickly notice that tech bloggers love to write obituaries.
Just search for "is dead" with your favorite technology appended; you'll learn that broadcast television is dead, cable TV is dead, radio is dead, Unix is dead, Java is dead, fax machines are dead, and Windows is dead.
Why stop there? The computer is dead. The Web is dead. The Internet is dead! What a massacre!
But technologies don't always cooperate with their epitaphs. Some folks don't get the memo and just keep using obsolete gear. Some tech ends up serving niche functions. Or devices are put to purposes beyond their original design. Consider, for instance, the telegram.
Telegrams
Good grief, who sends telegrams any more in this age of broadband? Even Sri Lanka is scrapping its colonial era telegraph system. That country's Postal Ministry looked at the costs and decided that they just weren't worth the benefit any longer. The government agency was charging three rupees (less than a US penny) for a ten-word telegram, but it cost the post office 250 rupees to send the telegram.
"Telegrams have competition from e-mail, courier, and SMS (short message services) on mobile phones," a Sri Lankan official observed.
Here in the United States, Western Union ended hand courier telegram service in February of 2006. But not Canada. Telegrams Canada is still in business.
"Send your greetings, condolences, or any important message by telegram," the company proclaims. "Use our same/next business day service to many cities in Canada and worldwide, or our economical MailGram delivery by post. You'll see why even after 160 years, telegrams never go out of style!"
Few people send out messages via Morse code any more. But the basic telegram concept—a missive spoken to an operator, then transmitted across wires or wireless, then hand-delivered to a recipient—is alive and well.
In fact, as in the nineteenth century, Telegrams Canada will write your telegram for you—or at least suggest gram language for appropriate occasions. The "Get Well" suggestions include "The office/this place is just not the same without you," and "Your many friends here are hoping for your quick recovery."
The service isn't cheap. A same business day telegram costs CAN$19.95 plus 99¢ per word. "Quebec usually next business day," the company advises. "Rural routes and post office boxes may take longer."
Ditto for the United Kingdom's Telegrams Online and Japan's NTT telecommunications company. Last year, the former sent 2 million telegrams across the UK (we were particularly impressed with the love telegrams). Subscribers to NTT's East Group can just dial "115" from 8am to 10pm, 365 days of a year. And consumers who want to order "fixed message urgent" grams (especially to ships) can buy them via a toll free number.
Teleprinters and telex systems
Teleprinters are automatic typewriters connected to phone lines. For seventy years, they operated in the service of telex systems—switched networks that allowed individual nodes within the matrix to send long typewritten messages to each other. Telex networks came into their own in the 1930s, starting in the United Kingdom and central Europe. They quickly spread around the world.
With the advent of fax machines and the Internet, most telex systems have disappeared. But radio telex is still used on ships to comply with the international Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS). And various telex formats are still offered (.doc) by government embassies in Africa, along with fax and e-mail addresses.
When I think of telex machines, I'm reminded of one of the most romantic moments of the Cold War. It was 1946 and the US Treasury Department was puzzled as to why the Soviet Union was being so obstinate about the World Bank, agreed to at the Bretton Woods conference held two years earlier.
To find out, an obscure Treasury Department functionary sent a telex message to George F. Kennan, a staffer at the American Embassy in Moscow, asking for an explanation. Kennan, who had witnessed the horrendous Stalinist purges of the 1930s, had given this question a little more thought than his superiors knew.
"The [Treasury] official could never have anticipated the page-upon-page response which clattered into the State Department telex room on the afternoon of February 22, 1946," explained one of Kennan's obituaries.
That noted, titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," is remembered as the "Long Telegram." Published in Foreign Affairs magazine the next year under the moniker "Mr. X," it urged the US government to adopt a strategy of "containing" the USSR at "a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points."
And that's pretty much how it went--40 years of history, dictated from a telex.
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