Nostalgic messages

AUSTRALIA: Five years after Western Union discontinued its telegram services, an Australian company is doing good business with this new old way of sending messages.

The history of the telegram goes back 160 years. Beginning in the late 1840s, the telegraph permitted urgent messages to be sent across long distances in a day. Letters sent by stagecoach could take weeks.

In telegraphy, messages are transmitted over wires using a system of electrical current pulses. A telegraph creates the pulses as a series of “dots and dashes”, usually in the Morse code, that correspond to letters. The text is decoded and typed on paper at the office closest to the destination, then delivered by the postal service or a messenger.

By the mid-1940s, improved telephone services sharply reduced the use and number of telegrams. Now, despite flat-rate telephoning, instant messages, chats and email, the company Madewell Enterprises in Melbourne is betting that nostalgia for more elegant and permanent messages will provide a profit.

Customers enter their message into the website Telegram Stop. About a week later, the message is delivered by post on authentic-looking telegram paper. The service costs US$ 6 (about €4) per telegram in any country, for national or international delivery.

Thanks to the telegraph, urgent messages could be sent across long distances in a day.

Sonia Eskildsen, operations manager for Telegram Stop, even has a personal connection to this traditional form of communication. "'My dad was a merchant seaman in the 70s, and you used to get a telegram from the company saying the ship would be in,'' she told The Sydney Morning Herald.