Full stop for the telegram in Belgium after 171 years

ONE of the world’s last telegram operators is mourning the death of the service after Belgium announced it would come to its final stop.

The news that the telegram service was closing after 171 years was broken, ironically, by a tweet sent by Proximus, the state-owned telecommunications company.

“Proximus – stop – ends the telegram – stop,” the tweet read before revealing the messaging service would end this Friday.

Belgium is one of the last countries to still offer the service. Britain, which invented the telegram in the 1830s, ditched it in 1982. India, once by far the world’s largest telegram market, shut down the system in 2013, seven years after the US sent its last.

“It is a big part of our heritage,” said Haroun Fenoux, of Proximus, which used to be called the National Telegraph and Telephone Company. “There is a sense of nostalgia. This is the end of a historical product, but it is time to finish,” he told The Daily Telegraph after explaining that modern communications are faster and cheaper.

The electric telegraph service, which used Morse Code, was launched in Belgium in 1846. In the early Eighties as many as 1.5million telegrams were sent and received every year.

Many were sent from Italy, which still offers the service, to Belgium’s Italian community.

By the Nineties, traffic had dropped to half a million telegrams, and to just 50,000 in 2010. This year, the number had dwindled to just over 8,000.