Why do you send a telegram?

Actually, these days, you don't. In their day (beginning in the late 1840s), telegrams were very important. In fact, the telegraph was considered an amazing invention, since it transmitted short messages by Morse Code hundreds of miles away, often in less than an hour. In the world before the internet, sending and receiving a message in the same day was considered a miracle, since it had taken days to send information by horse (or even by train) prior to the arrival of the telegraph. By the late 1800s, the telegraph had become an essential means of communication. Journalists relied on it to send stories back to their newspaper. And members of the public were excited to receive a telegram, since it usually meant important news, like an upcoming wedding or the fact that a family member from a distant city was arriving soon (or sometimes, a message that someone had just died). Messages were charged by the Word, and this meant information was now considered valuable and worth paying for.

But when technology improved (first radio, then TV, satellite, and finally the internet), the idea of sending messages by Morse code over telegraph wires lost its specialness. It was now much too slow to wait for a telegram, and there were many better and faster ways to send messages over long distances. One by one, telegraph companies went out of business and fewer people were receiving telegrams. For example, the Telegraph Service in India closed in July 2013: for more than 160 years, the telegraph was an important way to communicate in many parts of rural India. But in a world of smart-phones and instant messaging, few people seem eager to send or receive telegrams any more.