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When was the last telegram sent?

When was the last telegram sent?
15 July 2013
India's state telegraph service closed, the last large public network to do so

Western Union had stopped in the United States on 27 January 2006 after 145 years. India's BSNL kept going seven years longer because the telegram retained legal weight there for certain notices, and on its final day the service handled a surge of people sending one for the sake of it. A handful of small commercial services still exist, which is why "the last telegram" is a slightly slippery claim.

What
India's state telegraph service closed, the last large public network to do so
When
15 July 2013
Category
Technology that stopped
Could this change?
Not in any foreseeable way. The event is closed.

Technology that stopped

Question When
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This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When was the last telegram sent?
15 July 2013 — India's state telegraph service closed, the last large public network to do so.
What happened?
Western Union had stopped in the United States on 27 January 2006 after 145 years. India's BSNL kept going seven years longer because the telegram retained legal weight there for certain notices, and on its final day the service handled a surge of people sending one for the sake of it. A handful of small commercial services still exist, which is why "the last telegram" is a slightly slippery claim.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked