Editing Canadian Pacific Railway (section)

===Canadian Pacific Telegraphs===
The original charter of the CPR granted in 1881 provided for the right to create an [[electric telegraph]] and telephone service including charging for it. The telephone had barely been invented but telegraph was well established as a means of communicating quickly across great distances. Being allowed to sell this service meant the railway could offset the costs of constructing and maintaining a pole line along its tracks across vast distances for its own purposes which were largely for dispatching trains. It began doing so in 1882 as the separate Telegraph Department. It would go on to provide a link between the cables under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans when they were completed. Before the CPR line, messages to the west could be sent only via the United States.<ref>''Canadian Pacific Facts and Figures'' (1937), p. 106</ref>

Paid for by the word, the telegram was an expensive way to send messages, but they were vital to businesses. An individual receiving a personal telegram was seen as being someone important except for those that transmitted sorrow in the form of death notices. Messengers on bicycles delivered telegrams and picked up a reply in cities. In smaller locations, the local railway station agent would handle this on a commission basis. To speed things, at the local end messages would first be telephoned. In 1931, it became the Communications Department in recognition of the expanding services provided which included telephones lines, [[News agency|news wire]], [[stock ticker machine|ticker quotations]] for [[share capital|capital stocks]] and eventually [[teleprinter]]s. All were faster than mail and very important to business and the public alike for many decades before [[mobile phone]]s and computers came along. It was the coming of these newer technologies especially cellular telephones that eventually resulted in the demise of these services even after formation in 1967 of [[CNCP Telecommunications|CN-CP Telecommunications]] in an effort to effect efficiencies through consolidation rather than competition. [[Deregulation]] in the 1980s, brought about mergers and the sale of remaining services and facilities.<ref>Burnet, Robert. "Canadian Railway Telegraph History". ''Telegraph Key & Sounder'', Etobicoke, 1996. p. 181</ref>