India To Send World's Last Telegram 205
New submitter afarhan writes "India will pull the plug on its 160-year-old telegram service on 14 July, this year. This will probably be the last telegram ever sent in the world. However, telegrams are still relevant in this vast country. More than 500 million people are still without access to a phone or Internet. For these people, telegram still remains the only digital communication available. 'At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.' In India, telegram is also considered a legal correspondence."
not the world's last (Score:4, Interesting)
When Western Union discontinued its telegraph service in 2006, it sold off the network to iTelegram [itelegram.com], which inexplicably still seems to be in business.
Re:Nope ... Service still available in Europe (Score:3, Interesting)
And the NSA's Project SHAMROCK *still* intercepts every last one of them after all these years.
Re:digital? (Score:5, Interesting)
Morse code [wikipedia.org]does not necessarily a binary system. If sent by a machine, I could buy that, but it was designed to be sent by humans using a key. Later a two paddle bug was often used to speed up the code. One paddle sent a stream of dits, and the other keyed the dahs. you could vary the speed of the dits using a dial, but you varied the dahs using the paddle itself. Good operators would shorten the dahs, and use the fastest dits they could manage. So, you might use a dit from 40 wpm, but a dah from 45 wpm. The end result was code that was fairly easy to decode by a human operator, but difficult to decode by a machine. The best machines that I saw had an accuracy of about 85%, which was not good enough.
Later electronic bugs had two paddles that shaped both the dits and the dahs, but because the operator varied the space in between the elements you ended up with the same issues
A digital replacement for morse code was the Baudot Code [wikipedia.org]
.This used machine generated and read code. Early systems used a punch tape as storage medium.
I was a trained and certified Wireless Station Operator, when I first qualified I could send and receive 20> wpm using a stick (pencil) and hand key
Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
The end of the article gave me a chuckle. A guy is threatening to go on a hunger strike to keep the service going, insisting that it's a vital tool for fighting corruption ( presumably gov't corruption ) He sent his demands to the PM and others, via telegram of course. But someone at the telegraph office viewed the telegram as "objectionable" and have chosen not to deliver it.
So while India might still accept telegrams as legal documents, having a communications medium that requires a man-in-the-middle to function seems to be one that is too easily thwarted by the man in the middle.
Hopefully the guy on the hunger strike backed up his telegram with an email.