A man sells battery-powered radios and torches on a Barcelona street during the blackout in Barcelona, Spain, 29 April 2025. (Keystone/AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

💡 ❝As ITU turns 160, our interconnected world needs cooperation more than ever. When the Iberian Peninsula recently lost power, it wasn’t the internet or mobile networks people turned to – it was radio. In a world increasingly dependent on digital systems, the resilience of radio reminds us why the tech diplomacy pioneered by the International Telecommunication Union 160 years ago is still vital today – and why it matters for the future of emerging technologies like AI.

Delegates at the first International Telegraph Conference in Paris in 1865. At the meeting, representatives from 20 countries signed the first Convention of the International Telegraph Union, pictured in the background. (ITU)

⌛ Before the UN or the League of Nations. The ITU’s creation on 17 May 1865 marked a turning point in global communications and diplomacy. For the first time, countries came together to coordinate and regulate a rapidly evolving technology – not for alliances but for the benefit of society.

Representatives from 20 countries met in Paris and adopted a unified set of international telegraph regulations, which harmonised tariffs, procedures and technology across Europe. This led to the creation of the International Telegraph Union, renamed International Telecommunication Union in 1934.

📚Learn more about the ITU’s history.

💨🚩✉️Smoke, flags and wires. Telegraph, which comes from the Greek words “tele” meaning distance and “graphein” to write, describes any system for sending information over a distance by coded signals. Some of the earlier methods used smoke, torches or flags to send messages. By the 1850s, it came to mean sending electric signals along a wire, which took over from horse and courier as the fastest method of sending messages for several decades until new technologies such as radio and the telephone came along.

☠️‘A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill’. This message, sent on the world’s first commercial telegraph service in 1845, helped police catch murder suspect John Tawell as he escaped by train from the British town of Slough to London after poisoning his mistress, Sarah Hart. Thanks to the telegram, which gave a description of Tawell and details of the journey, he was arrested shortly after his arrival at Paddington Station.

💡The arrest brought the fledgling electric telegraph system, launched by inventors Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke six years earlier, into the public spotlight and led to its widespread use beyond railway signalling. But they were not the only ones with the idea. In the United States, inventor Samuel Morse sent the first message using his Morse code from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. By the late 1850s, telegrams were crossing the Atlantic.

🚨How technology can save lives. Today, about 3.5 billion people live in places that are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Before disasters strike and during emergencies, radio, SMS, cell broadcast, satellite and social media platforms become vital tools for raising the alarm, and giving people time to prepare or evacuate.

In 2022, the UN secretary general launched a global initiative, Early Warnings for All, aimed at scaling up early warning systems and ensuring everyone is protected by 2027. The ITU is leading one of its pillars, Warning Dissemination and Communication, which helps ensure that life-saving alerts reach those at risk in time to take action – for example, by supporting countries in establishing mobile-based systems such as cell broadcast, a method of sending text messages to multiple people at once.

The agency can also deploy satellite terminals as well as other emergency equipment to affected countries within the first 24-48 hours to help reestablish communication links.

📚Read more about the ITU’s disaster response.

📌 17 May | ITU160 Lightshow at Place des Nations. Gather tomorrow at 9 pm at the Esplanade adjacent to the iconic ITU tower, and watch projected images tell the story of 160 years of technology for humanity, multilateralism and resilience. The light show will also be streamed online. Find the full programme in the link below.

📌 7-11 July | WSIS+20 and AI for Good Global Summit. Global leaders, innovators and researchers will gather at Geneva’s Palexpo conference centre to explore how emerging technologies can drive sustainable development. Register online to discover the latest progress on advanced robotics, quantum computing, AI in space and brain-computer interfaces!

📌 17 July | ITU160 x CinéTransat. Attend a free screening of the classic movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” at 7:30 pm at Perle du Lac, and discover the ITU through a range of activities.