Paper no. 9: Exploitation for N.Z. telegraph services

Telegraphy is the oldest branch of telecommunications and, although the advent of telephony has produced strong competition to this means of communication, it continues to flourish. This has been adequately shown in Paper No. 1. Although early predictions forecast that telephony would supersede telegraphy, this has been far from the actual case. Telegraphy and telephony are not competing systems but are, in many cases, complementary. Although the spoken word has become so familiar to us in these days of inter-continental communication, telegraphy still has the unique advantage of providing a written record of all intelligence transmitted. The ability to deliver a message to an unattended office and the simplification of transmitting to a foreign country, thereby allowing translation of the message at the distant end to be carried out at leisure, are factors which weigh heavily in its favour.