Bye Bye Telegram

In India, after 160 years of the service, the telegram was bid farewell on the 15th July 2013. The origins of the telegram can be traced back to the smoke signals sent out and the light from the lighthouses for help during times of crisis. In 1793 a Frenchman named Claude Chappe devised a system using a movable pair of arms which could be put into 98 unique positions, each position corresponding to a letter, number, or coded word or phrase. It was called Chappe’s optical semaphore telegraph. In the mid 1830s Samuel F. B. Morse and William Fothergill Cooke independently developed a system that used long and short bursts of electricity that caused a stylus to draw dots and dashes on a strip of paper. This was called the Morse code.