Growing up in Europe 50 years ago, telegrams were a part of life although they tended to be used either for life/death news or when the recipient was in an out-of-the way location without easy access to phones etc. In the 1960s my parents had a vacation home in southern France at the end of 4 miles of dirt track, without phone or electricity. Every couple of weeks a delivery guy from the local village post office would turn up on his moped to deliver a telegram, usually announcing the pending arrival of guests (they had no other way to get in touch with us, except by mail). The guy was liberally irrigated by my parents, usually with Pastis, and the telegram was openened (and a reply prepared, if needed).
I can still remember the day I got my exam results graduating from high school in England. I was traveling at the time and got a telegram from my parents: "CONGRATULATIONS WELL DONE GREENER PASTURES ALL." Somehow a telegram had an impact and "officialness" that nothing else had.
But even in those days, and indeed going back even decades earlier, these weren't really telegrams. They were Telexes, printed out on a clattery printer at the local post office and shoved into an envelope. The same thing applied in the U.S. (I suspect the transition to Telex was even earlier, in America). Among my parents' letters, I have found wartime (WWII) telegrams that already had the apperance of a Telex.
Later, when I worked as a foreign correspondent, my employer gave me a "Telegraph Card" that I was supposed to use in local post offices to send news dispatches back to head office. Even then, they were basically obsolete -- I was already filing entirely with a laptop or personally from a hotel Telex. I never used the card. I was very profficient on the Telex ... because despite the high tech laptops we carried, there were plenty of places in the world where the phone lines weren't good enough to file digitally, or not available for international filing.
I wonder when the last *Morse* telegram was sent? Also, I wonder whether there may still be some really isolated spots where some form of telegram/telex is still used, notwithstanding the Christian Science Monitor's (unsourced) assertion that the Indian shutdown implies "the last telegram"?
73 de Martin, KB1WSY