night letter
A telegram sent overnight at a reduced rate for delivery on the morning of the following day, typically with a minimum charge for 25 words or less.
night letter: cheap overnight telegram service
A night letter was a telegram dispatched after business hours and delivered the following morning at a substantially reduced rate compared to standard day service. The carrier would accept the message late in the evening, batch it with other night traffic, and route it through the network during off-peak hours when transmission capacity was underutilized. This service existed because telegraph operators and switching equipment were expensive to run around the clock, and off-peak transmission cost the company less in operator wages and switching overhead.
The standard minimum was 25 words; customers paid a flat rate for anything up to that threshold, then an incremental charge per additional word. A customer sending "SHIPMENT DELAYED STOP REVISED DELIVERY TUESDAY MORNING STOP WILL CONFIRM DETAILS TOMORROW" would hit the minimum and pay the base rate regardless of whether they used 15 words or 25. This pricing structure encouraged compression of language and made night letters practical for routine business notices that did not require same-day delivery.
Variants and commercial use
Larger wire companies offered variations: the "mailgram" combined telegram delivery with postal carrier service to reduce final-mile costs. Some carriers guaranteed morning delivery within a specific region; others offered next-business-day service for remote locations. Overnight letter rates typically ran 30 to 50 percent below day rates depending on distance and the carrier's tariff schedule. The service was widely used for shipping notifications, price quotes, meeting confirmations, and routine correspondence between offices in different cities during the mid-20th century.
Night letters became less economically viable after 1980 as telephone calls and eventually fax and email offered faster alternatives at competitive cost. Most major carriers discontinued the service by the early 1990s. The term itself remains in dictionaries and historical accounts of electrical and telecommunications infrastructure, marking a specific solution to the problem of time-of-use pricing in electromechanical communications networks.