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Friday, December 29, 2017
After 171 years of existence, telegram services were permanently stopped in Belgium today. The service was launched in 1846, and about 9000 telegrams were sent across the country from January 2017 to November 2017.
On December 12, Belgian telecommunication company Proximus, who provided telegram services in the country, had announced they “will definitively end its telegram service” on December 29. Jack Hamande, board member of the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications, said, “It is mainly 10 customers using the telegram in Belgium today […] in finance, judicial services and insurance”.
The first telegram line was laid from Belgium’s capital Brussels to Antwerp. Usage of telegram has decreased exponentially over the decades. According to Proximus’s statistics, about 1.5 million telegrams were sent during early 1980s, with many telegrams coming from Italy, but the number dropped to fifty thousand in early 2010s. Sending a twenty-word message via telegram in Belgium would cost around €16 (about US$19). Hamande said, “Most of the current users of telegram will shift to registered mail […] we see no reason to force the company to maintain this service.”
Telegram is still functional in Italy. It was invented in the Great Britain in 1830s, but it was stopped in 1982. The United States stopped telegram services in 2006, and the last telegram in India was sent on July 14, 2013 which begun in 1850. In mid-1980s, about 600 thousand telegrams were sent across India each day.
“If you ask young people, they don’t know what a telegram is”, Hamande said.