The last clarion call of the Titanic, an announcement of the first successful flight and America's entry into World War One - on more than one occasion the telegram has been at the heart of history.
Now it is coming to a final end, in Belgium - one of the last countries to use the messaging service.
The final message will be delivered on December 29, 171 years after the country's first electric telegram was sent down a line laid alongside the railway linking Brussels and Antwerp.
"If you ask young people [about it], they don't know what a telegram is," says Jack Hamande, an executive board member at the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT).
"People like to have an instant response, which is not the case with a telegram."
The decline of the telegram has been swift in a world saturated by telephone networks, the internet and instant messaging services such as Whatsapp, Viber, Facebook Messenger and even Telegram - an app named after its predecessor which launched in 2013.
As recently as the 1980s, more than 1.5 million telegrams were sent and received per year in Belgium.
But fewer than 9,000 were dispatched in the first 11 months of this year, marking a 20 percent decline from 2016.
If you ask young people [about it], they don't know what a telegram is. Jack Hamande
And with fees rising to 16 euro ($19) for a 20-word message, the telegram has not been able to compete with today's technology.
No longer a necessity
Proximus, a telecommunications company, managed the telegram service in Belgium, where the government has ruled that the network no longer constitutes a public service.
The telegram has been kept alive by the custom of a handful of business clients.
"It is mainly 10 customers using the telegram in Belgium today … in finance, judicial services and insurance," says Hamande.
"Most of the current users of telegram will shift to registered mail … we see no reason to force the company to maintain this service."
Whereas a perceived lack of speed stalled the telegram's popularity in personal communications, developments in digital security have hastened the technology's end in the business world.
The emergence of digitally registered mail, in particular, has meant the telegram no longer occupies a niche in terms of its legal validity in Belgium and elsewhere.
According to David Hay, head of heritage and archives at BT (formerly British Telecom), telegrams were traditionally "used as evidence because they were date stamped automatically".
"Only in the past few years have things such as emails been accepted as legal evidence," he says.
Varied history, mixed messages
Britain, where the telegram was invented in the 1830s, switched off its network more than a decade ago. Other countries followed suit since, such as the United States in 2006, and India in 2013.
"After decades of good, loyal service, it is time for the telegram to give way to new means of communication," Proximus - Belgium's largest mobile telecommunications company - announced on its website on December 12.
But in its heyday, the telegram spread across the world, shaping the way governments, businesses and people interacted.
"It was a global technology, in the 19th century and for the first part of the 20th century, it was the major telecommunications technology," says BT's Hay.
"It was wholly revolutionary, it reduced the time it took to send messages from one end of the world to the other from months to hours and later minutes."
The technology transformed events from weddings to wars.
It had a much bigger impact on the world in terms of trade, governance and indeed society at the time than the internet has today. David Hay
"Telegrams [were sent] to families of people who were missing or killed," says Hay.
"If you saw a messenger coming up the garden path then invariably it was going to be bad news during wartime."
It was also used for moments of celebration.
In Britain, people sent congratulatory notes to couples getting married and new parents.
"They [operators] introduced greetings telegrams, which were much more colourful, rather than the drab brown form that was used for standard telegrams," says Hay.
"They were delivered in gold envelopes so that people would recognise they weren't bad news."
Today, in Belgium and elsewhere, the telegram is a relic.
"It had a much bigger impact on the world in terms of trade, governance and indeed society at the time than the internet has today," says Hay.
"The Victorians were astonished by the technology … They called it the electric fluid, and the wonder of the age."
Después de 171 años de existencia, los servicios de  se pararon de forma permanente en Bélgica desde ayer, 29 de diciembre. El servicio se lanzó en 1846, y se enviaron alrededor de 9000 telegramas en todo el país desde enero hasta noviembre de 2017.

Telegramas enviados en Bélgica por año aproximadamente, datos de . 

El 12 de diciembre, la empresa belga de telecomunicaciones , que prestó servicios de telegrafía en el país, anunció que «terminará definitivamente nuestro servicio de telegramas» el 29 de diciembre. Jack Hamande, miembro del consejo del Instituto Belga para los Servicios Postales y las Telecomunicaciones, dijo: «Son principalmente diez los clientes que usan el telegrama en Bélgica hoy en ... finanzas, servicios judiciales y seguros».

La primera línea de telégrafo se colocó desde la capital belga, , hasta . El uso del telegrama ha disminuido enormemente a lo largo de las décadas. De acuerdo con las estadísticas de Proximus, más o menos 1.5 millones de telegramas fueron enviados durante el principio de la década de 1980, con muchos procedentes de , pero el número cayó a  a principios de los 2010. Enviar un mensaje de veintiocho palabras por telégrafo en Bélgica costaba alrededor de 16  (unos 19 ). Hamande dijo que «La mayoría de los usuarios actuales del telegrama cambiarán al correo certificado ... no vemos ninguna razón para obligar a la compañía a mantener este servicio».

El telegrama sigue siendo funcional en Italia. Fue inventado en el  en la década de 1830, pero fue detenido allí en 1982.  detuvo los servicios de telegrafía en 2006, y el último telegrama en la  fue enviado el 14 de julio de 2013, allí había comenzado en 1850. A mediados de la década de 1980, se enviaban alrededor de 600 mil telegramas en toda la India cada día.

«Si le preguntas a la gente joven ... no saben lo que es un telegrama», dijo Hamande.