A telegram service is a company or public entity that delivers telegrams directly to the recipient. Telegram services were inaugurated after
electric telegraphy became available. Historically, telegrams were sent between a network of interconnected telegraph offices. A person visiting a local telegraph office paid by the word to have a message telegraphed to another office and delivered to the addressee on a paper form. Messages (i.e. telegrams) sent by telegraph could be delivered by
telegraph messenger faster than mail. The electric telegraph freed communication from the time constraints of
postal mail and revolutionized society and the global economy. A decline that began with the growth of the use of the
telephone was briefly postponed by the rise of special occasion congratulatory telegrams. Traffic continued to grow between 1867 and 1893 despite the introduction of the telephone in this period. At their peak in 1929, an estimated 200 million telegrams were sent. In 1919, the Central Bureau for Registered Addresses was established in the
financial district of
New York City. The bureau was created to ease the growing problem of messages being delivered to the wrong recipients. To combat this issue, the bureau offered telegraph customers the option to register unique code names for their telegraph addresses. Customers were charged $2.50 per year per code. By 1934, 28,000 codes had been registered. Telegram services still operate in much of the world. However,
e-mail and
text messaging have rendered telegrams obsolete in many countries, and the number of telegrams sent annually has been declining rapidly since the 1980s. Where telegram services still exist, the transmission method between offices is no longer by telegraph, but by
telex or
IP link. == Length and style ==