Farewell telegram. An era died with the last message

A few days ago, I spent a rainy afternoon with some of the amiable gentlemen at the Central Telegraph Office in the Eastern Court Building on Janpath in New Delhi, sending out fifteen telegrams, knowing that by the time this week winds down, the last telegram in India will have been signalled out of existence by the last telegraph operator.

“Unfortunately”, the gentlemen at Eastern Court informed me, “the last wire will not go out in dots and dashes in Morse Code, that ended years ago. Nowadays, we use email and photostats to transmit messages.” Even before it officially ended, the telegram had already become a ghost technology, riding others that were thought to be more vital and alive.

The first proposal to build a telegraph network in India was submitted by one Adolphe Bazin to the Asiatic Society in June 1839. The proposal, which Bazin termed as a plan to build an ‘Electro hydraulic telegraph for effective correspondence between Calcutta, London and the rest of the world’ may well have been the first cogently articulated desire to build a transcontinental communication system using electricity.

The proposal was as impractical as it was elaborate and ambitious. And a subcommittee that included an Irish doctor by the name of William O’ Shaughnessy rejected the proposal, arguing for a simpler system, more suited to local conditions. O’ Shaughnessy, in particular, pointed out the problems of humidity and moisture in the damp, rain-fed climate of Bengal, that any plan like Bazin’s which counted on using non insulated ‘common electricity’ would have to overcome.

O’Shaughnessy was an active member of the Asiatic Society, and avid correspondent and contributor to its journal and involved in several technical initiatives as an enthusiastic amateur. He had developed his own photographic process and built a camera, besides having the distinction of being the person to write a detailed pharmacopia for Cannabis Sativa Indica, a herb that has played an arguably important role in the history of human communication.

O’ Shaughnessy, perhaps inspired by the mind-expanding properties of the substances he was consuming, was already interested in using electro-chemical conductivity for communication. Electricity, it must be remembered was viewed almost as an ‘occult and esoteric elemental force’ well into the late nineteenth century, and any number of the electrical pioneers of the Victorian Age, right up to Nicholas Tesla were also dabbling in what today we would consider strictly X Files material.

O’Shaughnessy, the stoned Irishman in damp Calcutta, was building electromagnetic motors, batteries and conductors in 1835-36, and was involved in the construction of a 1,000 cell Mullins battery. In a letter to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal, O’Shaugnessy described himself as the man ‘who in 1837 declared an electric telegraph to be a practicable thing... and proved it to be so in 1837 (we know, because he documented everything he did, including his daily experiments with hashish).

He goes on to record that the reward for his preliminary experiments was ‘universal ridicule for the advancement of such visional and impracticable ideas’ and it would appear that his breakthrough in electromagnetic communication came in May 1839 and he described his experiment in September of the same year in The Journal of the Asiatic Society. In this paper titled Memorandum Relative to Experiments on the Communication of Telegraph Signals by Induced Electricity, he mentions a previous experiment in which he had ‘fallen into the error of indulging prematurely in dreams of useful results, and of reasoning unguardedly from the model to the machine’.

DK Lahiri-Chaudhauri, a pioneering historian of technology, has shown how O’Shaughnessy’s place in the history of telegraphy is an object lesson in the vagaries of intellectual property. His tragedy if you want to think of it that way, or his great good fortune, if you want to think of it that way, amounted to the fact that he was working at a time pregnant with telegraphic experimentation.

O’Shaughnessy’s telegraphic work is exactly contemporaneous with the work of Samuel Morse, the person usually credited with the invention of the electric telegraph and the morse code.

The difference is the fact that Morse wanted to, and could patent his ‘inventions’, and O’Shaughnessy sat dreaming about the possibilities of what he called ‘sympathetic flesh telegraphy’ where the human skin itself, because of its conductive properties, is used as a transmitter and a receiver of electrical signals. Indeed his earliest prototype visualizes a telegraph operator with his finger against a needle, sensitive to a series of micro electrical responses that he learns to read as discrete elements in a cipher connected to the English alphabet.

In doing this O’Shaughnessy was trying to teach the body how to read, how to communicate, and though we can speculate about how influenced these ideas were by his hashish-induced trance states where he reports a heightened level of sensate awareness, what is certain is that his experiments were probably some of the earliest exercises in ‘wearable’ new media, where the telegraph receiver was in a sense an extension both of the nervous system as well as of the epidermis itself.

O’ Shaughnessy wrote in his Memorandum...: “The delicacy of the impressions of touch transcends the sensitivity of all other senses. The eye and the ear are liable to distraction by casual sounds or phenomena, while the attentive touch knows no interruption.” He goes on to say: “The most perfect sympathy is practicable between the signalists, and that as fast as the signal can be felt, in short, with little less velocity than the articulations of language or writing of stenographic characters, this silent but thoroughly intelligible and still most secret of correspondences can take place. “

The end of the telegram is not something we need to mourn, but it is not something that ought to go unmarked either. The least we could do is to tap out a salute to William O’Shaughnessy. That would be a fitting farewell to the telegram.

The author is an artist with the Raqs Media Collective and occasionally writes on Kafila.Org