The cost of the transmission of a cablegram varies from one shilling
per word, the rate to New York and east of the Mississippi, to ten
shillings and seven pence per word, the rate to New Zealand. In order
to minimize that cost as much as possible, the use of codes, whereby
one word is made to do duty for a lengthy phrase, is much resorted to.
Of course those code messages form a series of words having no
apparent relation to each other, but occasionally queer sentences
result from the chance grouping of the code words. Thus a certain tea
firm was once astonished to receive from its agent abroad the
startling code message--"Unboiled babies detested"!

Suppose we now follow the adventures of a few cablegrams in their
travels over the world.

A message to India from London by the cable route requires to be
transmitted eight times at the following places: Porthcurno
(Cornwall), Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez, Aden, Bombay.

A message to Australia has thirteen stoppages; the route taken beyond
Bombay being via Madras, Penang, Singapore, Banjoewangie and Port
Darwin (North Australia); or from Banjoewangie to Roebuck Bay (Western
Australia).

To India by the Indo-European land lines, messages go through Emden,
Warsaw, Odessa, Kertch, Tiflis, Teheran, Bushire (Persian Gulf), Jask
and Kurrachee, but only stop twice between London and Teheran--namely,
at Emden and Odessa.

Messages from London to New York are transmitted only twice--at the