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

A telegram in the same files shows a doctor from Cornwall, who was treating a 10-year-old child in 1944, pleading with the authorities for the medicine: "No hope without penicillin".

From BBC ● Jun. 5, 2025

Day after day he marches into town, negotiating by telegram, and by the following Friday the son has agreed to meet us in Providence and take custody of the old man.

From "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen

There, Susan met Giorgos Xenarios, a goldsmith and jewelry maker 27 years her senior who, after many love letters, telegrams, intercontinental trips and one very firm ultimatum, migrated to the U.S. in 1974.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 2025

Morecambe's collection includes telegrams from the late Prince Philip and letters from Margaret Thatcher and fellow comics Ronnie Barker and Tommy Cooper.

From BBC ● Nov. 18, 2024

The White House was flooded with more than 300,000 letters and telegrams denouncing his life sentence.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 30, 2024

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

Prendergast’s father got him a job delivering telegrams for Western Union, which the boy held for a year and a half.

From "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

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

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

“Hold your hand out you silly girl,” McCartney telegrammed one music critic, Penny Valentine, quoting the Beatles’ “Martha My Dear,” after she called his first solo album “a bitter disappointment.”

From New York Times ● Dec. 6, 2022

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

But my mother had telegrammed back, "No, it is Esther's writing. She thinks she will never write again."

From "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

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