Belgium Ends 19th-Century Telegram Service:

One hundred and seventy-one years after the first electronic message was transmitted down a line running alongside the railway between Brussels and Antwerp the final dispatch will be sent and received on 29 December. The fact that this 19th-Century technology is still up and running in the age of Instagram and Snapchat may seem rather odd -- especially when you consider that the UK, which invented the telegram in the 1830s, abandoned it as long ago as 1982. The United States followed suit in 2006 and even India, which had been by far the world's biggest market for the telegram, finally closed its system down in 2013. Before the invention of the telephone, the telegram was the first system that allowed the more-or-less instant transmission of electronic messages over long distances. The electronic impulses from the sender's machine - Morse code became the commonest system -- were translated into text at the receiving end, first by human operator and then eventually by machine.

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