Belgium bids farewell to the telegram

17/01/2018

After 171 years of faithful service, the telegram is no longer. As of 29 December last year, the Belgian operator Proximus ended the telegraph service, which had witnessed a decline in the face of today's more modern and much cheaper technology.

The first electric telegraph connection was installed along the railway line between Brussels and Antwerp in 1846, thus heralding the telegram service introduced by the RTT (Régie des télégraphes et Telephones - Telegraph and Telephone Administration), which made it possible to deliver urgent messages quickly. For example, the Titanic sent a distress message via telegram at the moment of impact with the iceberg, and it was also by telegram that births, marriages, or deaths were announced, especially in times of war.

Over time and with various technological advances, other more accessible and sophisticated means of communication competed with telegrams, to the extent that today, the thought of having to pay between 15 and 20 euros to send twenty words by telegram seems faintly absurd. However, for those who required legal proof of sending, judicial officers being a good example, the telegram was still an advantageous choice.

But this minority of users could not prevent the decline of the service, which had been so popular in the 1960s. Gradually, the one and a half million telegrams sent in Belgium in the 1980s had dwindled to a mere 50,000 messages in 2010, before falling to just 8,000 messages in 2017. The time had come for Proximus to phase out the service.

Although no longer obliged to do so since 2013, Belgium nonetheless decided to continue offering this "public interest service". However, other countries had already chosen to retire their telegram service long ago, including the United States, India, and Great Britain, the very first country in the world to send a telegram. Despite this, in Spain, Italy and Argentina, the telegram still has a role to play, and enjoys modest success.

For Belgium, at any rate, this is the end of the line for a service which revolutionised the means of communication in its day. End of telegram. STOP.