Paris, May 17, 1865. In the Salon de l’Horloge at the Quai d’Orsay, a room the ITU’s own history describes as one of the building’s most sumptuous, representatives of 20 countries put their names to the International Telegraph Convention, creating the International Telegraph Union. One essay on the anniversary compresses the founding into a single line: “The network existed. The rules did not.”
The problem they met to solve was dull and enormous. Telegraph messages moved fast, but every border stopped them: each crossing meant a message had to be translated into the next jurisdiction’s transmission code, and procedures, charges and accounting rules shifted from country to country. The world’s first commercial telegraph service had opened in London in 1839; a submarine cable joined Britain and France in 1850; a transatlantic cable followed in 1858. The hardware scaled. The paperwork did not.
France convened the conference and foreign minister Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys chaired it, with a stated job of bringing order to the swelling flow of international telegrams.
What the treaty did
The convention attacked the problem concretely. It introduced a common tariff logic and a standard charging system, attached a tariff table for cross-border traffic, and set one monetary unit, the French franc, for settlements. It required Morse equipment and code, the institution stepping in to specify the network’s working language rather than just procedures. What the signatories wanted was what the institutional history calls a “simple and reduced tariff”, shared rules without erasing national distinctions.
Radio forced a rewrite
Wireless broke the model. Wires had pushed states into coordinating routes and accounting; radio pushed them into coordinating a commons, with signals moving through shared space. In Berlin in 1906, the first International Radiotelegraph Convention drew twenty-nine nations, who created the International Radiotelegraph Union, whose annex became the ancestor of today’s Radio Regulations, while the existing telegraph bureau served as the conference’s central administrator.
By 1932 the telegraph and radiotelegraph worlds no longer made sense apart. Between 3 September and 10 December of that year, a joint conference merged the two bodies into the International Telecommunication Union, merging the 1875 Telegraph Convention with the Radiotelegraph Convention of 1927. The UN’s own magazine dates the renaming to 1934; the essayist’s account has the merger in 1932. Either way, the institution had outgrown its original medium.
The UN era
ITU, headquartered in Bern from 1869, reached an agreement with the new United Nations on 15 November 1947, an arrangement that entered into force on 1 January 1949 and made it the UN’s specialized agency for telecommunications. It soon moved to Geneva, where the Varembé Building, inaugurated in 1962, finally put all staff under one roof. Its first space conference came in 1963, soon after the first communication satellites, with 70 countries allocating frequency bands for space radiocommunication. UN Secretary-General U Thant addressed those delegates by satellite from his New York office.
Why it still bites
Today the agency counts 194 governments plus over 1000 companies, universities and organizations, managing the radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbit resources as every wireless service competes for a share. The essay’s line on the founding age reads as current commentary: networks need standards, and “standards are politics in technical clothing”. The nineteenth century faced the question of how telegrams could move between sovereign systems. The ITU still exists because communications remain too international for improvisation.
Sources
- From the telegraph to digital: a glimpse into ITU’s story – UN Today
- The First Internet Before the Internet: How the ITU Began in 1865
