Hobbyists Sound Taps for Cherished Telegraph Key

Skip Freely sits in his den amid dusty electronic gear and the faint sound of clicking, hoping that somewhere, somebody will hear the code from his telegraph key and answer his message that everything is fine in Newport Beach. He might not get an answer, but he taps and taps and taps, and he hopes. Somehow, Freely figures, if he taps enough, “maybe I can bring the telegraph back.”

It all started for him in 1948, when he and his family received an urgent telegram that an aunt had died and that they were to be left an inheritance. He was intoxicated by the message of death and money, quick and blunt and mysterious.

But now, more than 50 years later, Freely reluctantly concedes that he hasn’t received a telegram in decades and that telegraphy, which many say created the first worldwide web of communication, is over.

“It’s a great loss,” says 62-year-old Freely, who works as an electronics engineer at Caltech. “There is no sense of permanency in what we send anymore.”

Apart from a handful of hobbyists like Freely, who transmit their Morse code by radio or phone lines because the telegraph lines are gone, the once-ubiquitous telegram is dying a slow and quiet death. Regarded in its day as one of the best ways to send an urgent message, the first electronic form of communication has been displaced by the telephone, the fax machine and the Internet.

The business has been fading for decades. But in recent years, with the advent of digital portable phones and cheap personal computers, the telegram business is doing worse than ever.

Western Union, the company synonymous with telegrams, sent about 130,000 last year. That’s about as many as the company sent every few hours in 1929, when the telegram hit its peak.

Even Western Union executives, though nostalgic about their company’s roots, say it’s time for the telegram’s obituary.

The business has sprouted offshoots, such as novelty singing telegrams and electronic money transfers, that are doing well. Today Western Union’s Moneygram business, fueled by immigrants sending money home, is growing 20% a year and accounts for virtually all of the company’s $2 billion in annual revenue, company spokesman Peter Ziverts says.

But romantic days of the Roaring ‘20s, “where the uniformed messenger would come to your door to give you an urgent message, are dead,” says Gerry Gasper, who started his career as a telegraph operator and now is director of a Western Union office outside of St. Louis.

“Sad,” he says. “We’re so caught up in talking to each other, you would think we would still need telegrams. . . . But nowadays nobody needs any more than one of those computers.”

Once telegrams were used for the most significant of events, heralding graduations, births and business deals. They conveyed urgency like nothing else, and people received them with a mix of apprehension and anticipation. They were bearers of big news.

Usually the message was concise: “GRANDMA IS DYING STOP COME HOME STOP.” Some telegraph enthusiasts say that Ernest Hemingway, who sent war reports to newspapers via telegram, owes his terse writing style to the medium.

Some people still use telegrams to mark big events, telegram companies say--mostly older people who long for the decorum they symbolize (“CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU AND YOUR LOVELY WIFE”).

But more often, companies say, they are used to cancel an order from an infomercial (“DON’T WANT JUICER”).

Today, faxes and e-mail have replaced the telegram almost entirely. “It’s too bad,” Freely says. “The writing [in e-mail] is junk because it is transitory. Nobody has looked at the punctuation. It’s just not the same as the earlier stuff. You paid money for a telegram. And you sent something good.”

Regardless, experts say, the popular acceptance of e-mail was the death blow to the telegram.

At the White House, which once received thousands of telegrams a year, the president’s correspondence office in 1996 stopped counting telegrams and began tallying e-mail. Even Boston’s Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, created in 1919 to collect urgent data from astronomers via telegram, doesn’t receive them anymore.

“The last real telegram we got was about four years ago when the Hale-Bopp comet was discovered,” said Brian G. Marsden, director of the bureau and an Englishman who says he is tied to the formality of the telegram.

“We won’t see the comet for another 2,500 years, and that’s probably how long it will be before we get another telegram. . . . I still refuse to change our name to contain ‘astronomical e-mails.’ It’s quaint as it is, and we’re keeping it.”

Another reason people don’t send them is expense. It costs roughly $30 to send the typical telegram, which nowadays is simply taken over the telephone, faxed to another location and read by an operator to the recipient. Making your own phone call or fax might cost only a few cents.

If the telegram has a future, it is in the hands of hobbyists. The Morse Telegraph Club, with more than 2,000 members worldwide, is trying to revive interest in the telegraph. But lacking telegraph wires, members mostly use modems to transmit their telegraph-key messages.

It doesn’t make sense to people in the group that in a world of communication there is no place for the telegram. “There is nothing wrong with communication like this. When Y2K comes, I’ll be on my telegraph,” jokes Jim Adkins, the Illinois hobbyist who is also president of the group. There is an awe in his voice reflecting his deep respect for a medium that altered the planet, the way wars were fought and the way news was collected.

But the evolution of technology isn’t necessarily fair, and perfectly good ideas often are displaced in a glut of similar technologies, says Larry Milstein, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego who specializes in communications technology. For all the recent improvements, “the telegram is truly valuable and timely,” he says. “There is a sense of value to the message.”

Freely plans to continue his tongue-in-cheek campaign to bring the telegraph back. Indeed, he knows that would be like reviving the horse as transportation--a reasonable way to travel, but who would do it with a car around?

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An Era Ending

The number of telegrams delivered by Western Union has plummeted 99.9% from a peak of nearly 200 million in 1929. Money transfergrams, though, are on the rise.

Annual Telegram deliveries

1929 199 million, a record high

*

1995 173,000

1996 161,000

1997 150,000

1998 139,000

1999 130,000*

2000 110,000*

Annual Money transfer grams

1997 40 million

1998 50 million1999 63 million*

* projected

Source: Western Union

TIMELINE

1837 Telegraph

1876 Telephone

1931 TWX/telex

1974 E-mail

early 1980s Cellular phone

late 1980s Fax machine

mid 1990s Digital phones

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, World Book Encyclopedia

The Morse Code

Named after its developer, Samuel Morse, the Morse Code is a series of dots and dashes that represent letters of the alphabet. An operator uses short and long clicks on a telegraph key that opens and closs an electric circuit. Once an important method of long-distance communication, the messages were transmitted on telegraph wire strung on poles. One of the best known Morse Code messages is the international distress signal--SOS--three dots, three dashes, three dots. Here is the code: