Email in the time before those intertubes
At the other end of the table, it’s review time for ESL materials (a trick of the trade). Oddly enough, I can’t imagine how some of this stuff ever makes it past first presentation. Telling a child that he’s going to receive a telegram (as in Western Union) can’t mean very much any more. No meme here.
I think I have a few ‘flimsies’ around the house (don’t even go there). Probably, somewhere, there’s still a paper mill producing the stuff, which wasn’t good for very much else except final delivery of telegrams (there’s that word again). Let’s start with a simple explanation of the process.
Back, a long time ago, companies strung copper wire from pole to pole to pole, across cities and nations and continents. The marvel of electricity allowed those wires to carry electronic signals, much like the Internet, except that it required people with good hearing and high levels of concentration to copy down letters sent in a particular code. The sound, on a good day, was something like this.
As long as the bad guys didn’t break the wire, a message could be sent from one part of the world to another, and this snippet of information (akin to an email message) was carefully typed (using a typewriter, but we’ll save that for another day) onto the flimsy and that “hard copy” was then delivered, by hand, to the destination. Dozens of messages could be delivered during a given hour, and the world was a better place because of technology.
Now, this still isn’t going to be clear to the younger members of our audience, so we’ll have to invent other marvellous things. Maybe some variation on the silent movie, although you’ll then have to imagine the clickety-clack of the telegraph.
