telegram

At the time, the Tana family was vacationing on a remote Yugoslav island when a telegram arrived: “The restaurant burned down. Call me, Pearl,” recalls Katerina Tana, one of Dan Tana’s daughters.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 14, 2026

Within hours of carrying the first telegram across the English Channel in 1850, the earliest “submarine telegraph”—27 miles of copper wire wrapped in a rubbery substance called gutta percha—was broken by a fishing trawler.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 4, 2026

The author sent a telegram to his mother back home in French-controlled Algeria: “I’ve never missed you so much.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 8, 2026

“The Queen and Elton John sent me a telegram of congratulations - my mum and dad were interviewed all week - it was a big thing.”

From BBC ● Oct. 30, 2024

Inside his safe, they found a cache of seventeen short, encrypted messages on slips of yellow telegram paper.

From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield

Officials said the message had left Downing Street correctly but blamed an error in transmission and suggested telegrams should be abandoned altogether.

From BBC ● Dec. 29, 2025

Stefansson’s telegrams to the dead men’s families are perfunctory.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025

At its center, a young, unnamed telegraph operator watches as the beautiful, married Lady Bradeen sends flurries of telegrams, hoping that no one will notice the messages to the dashing Captain Everard.

From Slate ● May 27, 2024

According to the telegrams, the Vatican embassy sent what U.S. churches had collected from the American faithful, down to the cents: $210,400.09, allowing the vote that eventually elected Pope Pius XI.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 19, 2024

I said we’d all be better off out in the fresh air on this fine day delivering telegrams, Miss Barry.

From "Angela's Ashes: A Memoir" by Frank McCourt

Toward the end of 1926, Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who would co-father “Citizen Kane,” telegrammed his friend Ben Hecht, the newspaperman who was finding himself between gigs and behind on his rent.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2023

“I didn’t know what to do with myself. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”

From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2023

Nesbit had a serious relationship with the author Donald Barthelme before she married Gilman, and one day, Barthelme telegrammed her from Europe.

From Washington Post ● Feb. 14, 2023

At one point, after the mega-success of the "Ringo" LP, no less than John Lennon famously telegrammed Starr, saying “Congratulations. How dare you? And please write me a hit song.”

From Salon ● Oct. 25, 2019

The day before, he had telegrammed President Kennedy and listed twenty different, racially motivated, unpunished actions taken by white men against black people in Birmingham.

From "While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement" by Carolyn Maull McKinstry

In 1916, Charles Evans Hughes waited two weeks before telegramming his concession to Woodrow Wilson, who noted that the message was “a little moth-eaten when it got here but quite legible.”

From Slate ● Nov. 7, 2012