[ANON POST] Telegrams and 19th-century espionage

[kutsuwamushi]

The short version of my question is, how would one intercept and/or obtain a copy of a telegram addressed to someone else? My story deals partially with the espionage going on in pre-WWI Europe, and one of my characters is trying to get hold of a telegram delivered to someone he knows is a spy. In my research I've been able to turn up all sorts of

Comments

[world_dancer]

As I understand telegrams, people went to the telegraph office and filled out a form.

So, you just need to steal the form with the message from a pile of similar forms (in a busy telegraph office). In a slow office it would be harder to acquire.

If you don't care if the message was sent and just want to know what it was, telegraphers usually put the finished form on one of those table spike things so that it wouldn't get mixed up with the new mail, and then I think they just threw them out/burned them to keep warm. So they're not necessarily hard to acquire.

[xolo]

The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" involves Holmes using social engineering to get a telegraph clerk to show him the hardcopy of a message that had been sent, and goes into a bit of detail regarding how sent messages are stored at the office.

[world_dancer]

I was just about to say exactly the same thing. In the story, Holmes sweet-talks the telegraph clerk into showing him the message by pretending to be the person who sent it (he points out that this particular telegraph office is so busy that they probably don't remember faces), and saying that he is worried because he hasn't received a reply and wants to make sure that he put his name at the end. In this particular case, he already knows the content of the message; he's just trying to figure out to whom it was sent.

[world_dancer]

Sorry, I intended to leave a link to the story (it's in the public domain).

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DoyMiss.html

[sethg_prime]

For general information about telegraphy in that era, I recommend the book The Victorian Internet.