India to send world's last telegram [telecom]

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By Shivam Vij, Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor, June 14, 2013 fast.

| New Delhi | At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state- | owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix | printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi. | "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's | one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by | telegram - a format favored for its "sense of urgency and | authenticity," explains a BSNL official. | | But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's | last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on | July 14.

| That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the | first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western | Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, | telegraph services were introduced by William O'Shaughnessy, | a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for | the first time in 1850 to send a message.

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Neal McLain