The Arbitrage Life: We still use Telegrams?!

Human beings love to communicate nowadays. We have more ways to communicate than ever. Apart from the good old-fashioned vocal cords, you've got (by the numbers):

• 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.
• 36 trillion Whatsapp messages per year
• 14 trillion WeChat messages
• 7 trillion texts
• 200 billion tweets
• 109 billion Zoom calls
• 17 million telegrams

Yep, you heard me right - the world still sends millions of telegrams every single year. That raises a few questions why such an old and outdated technology has managed to stick around while so many others like pagers dial-up modems and the iPhone 12 have all but disappeared.

First, understand just how influential and widespread telegraph systems really were.  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 maidens DMs from another city, your message could take weeks to arrive, enough time for her to get swept off her feet 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 communication system in the United States. After receiving a letter informing him that his wife was sick, he traveled home to Connecticut only to discover that she had already died and 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, Morse set out to develop a national network and design a new telegraph language to decode the electrical impulses into words. By the 1850s, telegrams were all the rage with 12,000 miles 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.

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 that's basically why they still exist today. 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 2022. 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 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 a 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.