1 Less Is More

In an age when people still sent telegrams and paid for their messages by the word, the telephone companies—which were not to be outdone by an older technology—would proudly proclaim, “Every telephone is a telegraph office.” 1 Much like today's mobile phones, this combination of technologies made the world a smaller and more connected place, allowing people to do many of the same things that web-savvy users go online to do today, such as transferring money, booking tickets for passage by rail or sea, and ordering flowers, candy, books, and cigars for delivery to recipients in cities across the globe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the world was connected not by the Internet or the web but by transatlantic cable, and the “last mile” was just a boy on a bicycle, how-to books such as Nelson Ross's “How to Write Telegrams Properly,” a 1928 pamphlet, would joke that “brevity is the soul of telegraphy.” Though it is often said that it costs nothing to be polite, the telegraph was a communication medium whose users had to pay to say “please” and pay twice as much again to say ”thank you.” If the telegraph was the Internet of its day, the telegram was its tweet.