The Age of Telegrams

In 2005 when even primary school children think they need a mobile phone it's hard to imagine a world when such things didn't exist. Indeed, in Sydney when I was growing up during the 1940s only a few people in my street had any kind of telephone at all and the lines were so bad that you had to shout if you were making a "trunk" call of any distance. And I didn't live in Bandywallop and Wheelabarabak—I'm talking about Gladesville, just ten kilometres from the Sydney C.B.D.

At such a time the only way people could stay in touch was by mail or, if urgency demanded, by telegram. In such an age the telegraph came into its own.

Everybody sent telegrams once in a while. They were a must for business (neither Telex nor faxes were available before the late 1950s), were popular for sending Christmas ("MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR LOVE") and birthday greetings or wedding congratulations ("BEST WISHES BEWITCHING BRIDE BASHFUL BRIDEGROOM"), and were commonplace for travel ("ARRIVED SAFELY, HOME TUESDAY").

Wages were low in those days but Morse was so labour-intensive that telegrams were expensive to send. They were charged for by the word (including the address) with a minimum charge for twelve words, so users kept the content to a minimum.

Lots of claims have been made about the speed telegraphists could reach on a morse circuit. In the Australian post office (known as the Postmaster General's Department back then) qualification speed was 22 words a minute. Then, depending on whether the operator went to a busy centre or to a country town whose throughput was only a few telegrams a day, his speed would either improve with practise or deteriorate. Mostly we worked within the range of 20-25 words a minute.

By the 1930s teleprinters and teletypes had started to replace Morse. Due to their mechanical limitations they could only operate at about 60 words a minute but this was much faster than the best Morse operator could achieve. They had the additional advantage of needing only one operator to send the messages which could then be torn off a continuous roll when somebody had time at the distant station.

About 1960 Morse was dropped by the PMG's Department and the final message was sent in 1962. It was replaced by an automated network of teleprinters known as TRESS (Teleprinter REperforator Switching System). It still took a telegraphist to punch the perforated five-unit tape that was fed into the transmitters, but from that point onward all switching was automatic.

Harry Winchester sends Australia's last telegram.