This strict sense of telegraph developed from French usage for Napoleon's overland semaphore network but rather arbitrarily excludes similar Chinese and other signalling networks.

The first message transmitted by telegraph in the United States was WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.

The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative... By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.

He took a jab and telegraphed his punch so loudly that I was able to land a solid right hand to his stomach.

For weeks, Ukrainian officials had telegraphed plans for a planned counterattack in the southern Kherson region, but instead the main focus of this week’s counterattack has been Kharkiv in the north-east, taking everyone, including apparently the Russians, by surprise.

Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said China appeared to telegraph “a reproach to the Russians, that they’re not acting like a great power, that they are creating instability.”

Telegraph

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