At 7pm on 20th August 1911, a commercial telegram was sent by the telegraph operator at the Times, working on the seventeenth level of the newspaper’s headquarters in Times Square. The message made a westward journey from New York, and shortly afterwards, the very same operator received his transmitted message back, having arrived back to him eastwards.
The New York Times had wanted to find out how long a commercial telegram would take to travel around the world, so they tried it!
The message simply said “This message sent around the world.” And it did indeed go around the world… in just sixteen and a half minutes!
Not bad, but that was a commercial telegram and therefore it wasn’t sent with all the priority that could potentially be mustered. That honour went to President Roosevelt years before back in 1903 on 4th July, Independence Day, when his absolutely top priority message travelled around the world in just nine and a half minutes. By way of comparison, that’s a little bit faster than it would take to wrap up your message, instruct a driver, team up and feed some horses and get a mail coach out of the yard and onto the road!
Talking of horses, the Pony Express immediately became obsolete and ceased trading just two days after the first trans-continental telegraph was sent many years earlier, during the American Civil War. Of course, sending a telegram in those early days was wildly expensive. A relatively short distance telegram could cost in the region of $100 for the equivalent of a Twitter post or short text message.
With the rate of pace of change these days, it’s easy to forget that technological progress even 150 years ago was still pretty awesome. For example, the 98 letter message sent from Queen Victoria to the US President Buchanan, in Pennsylvania, US, was very difficult to decipher and took 16 hours to send. It was nevertheless revolutionary to send electronic communications across vast oceans in 1858. The novelty of her message meant that it was followed by a hundred gun salute, street parades, church bell ringing and all other sorts of other excitement across the land.
Perhaps take a moment a think about that next time you send an encrypted video message via WhatsApp to a friend back home whilst you’re abroad on your holidays!
