Final telegram to be sent. STOP

^'"WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?" telegraphed Samuel Morse to his business partner Alfred Vail on 24 May 1844. Morse was in Washington, Vail was in Baltimore, and they were connected by a telegraph line constructed to demonstrate the power of telegraphy to Morse's backers in Congress. There were earlier experiments, but these resonant words – chosen from the Old Testament by the daughter of a friend of Morse – have survived as the first telegram.

Telegraphy dominated communications for most of the rest of the 19th century and remained significant in the 20th, but now we are close to the end of the line. Telegrams disappeared in the UK in 1982 and these days even centenarians only get a card from the Queen; Western Union abandoned its telegram service in the US in 2006; and this weekend India, bastion of the last great telegraphy service thanks to the government's traditional devotion to sending telegrams, follows suit. It is not quite the end – heritage services continue in many places and telegrams are still used for specific purposes in some countries (in Argentina, you are supposed to resign from your job by telegram) – but the final STOP is looming.

What a tragedy. For one thing, what would a wedding be without the best man reading out a fistful of lewd telegrams, with their evocative block capitals and air of having been pasted together from old newspapers? Texts can never convey that air of urgency and excitement. We also miss the compression that the cost of sending a telegram necessitated. Some of them make Twitter look verbose. "HOW OLD CARY GRANT?" a reporter cabled the Hollywood actor. "OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?" he reportedly replied.

The shortest telegram exchange on record is Victor Hugo's with his publisher: "?", he telegrammed when inquiring about sales of his latest book; "!" the publisher replied. The tale is sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde, underlining how much of telegram lore has become mythic.

"EVERYTHING IS QUIET. THERE WILL BE NO WAR. I WISH TO RETURN," cabled Frederic Remington to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in 1897. "YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES, AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR," Hearst is supposed to have replied. Print the legend.

Orville Wright sent the most historic telegram, in December 1903: "SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS THURSDAY MORNING ALL AGAINST TWENTY ONE MILE WIND." American author Robert Benchley sent the funniest: "STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE," he wrote to New Yorker editor Harold Ross on his first trip to Venice. Peter Sellers the most superfluous (and insulting). He was working in his study and his wife Anne was downstairs. The doorbell rang; Anne answered; it was a courier with a telegram: "BRING ME A CUP OF COFFEE. PETER."

Australian comic writer Lennie Lower made more effective use of the form when resigning after an argument with the publishing company that ran his columns: "UPSTICK JOB ARSEWISE". Brief, punchy, witty: the perfect telegram.