A telegrapher was a person whose job was working the telegraph — sending and receiving messages over the wires. This was a real skilled trade for about a hundred years, from the 1840s until the middle of the twentieth century. The telegrapher sat with a hand key, tapping out Morse code: short taps and long taps standing for letters. Sending was one half of the skill; the harder half was listening, because a fast message came in as a stream of clicks and the telegrapher wrote the words down in real time, at speed, without asking anyone to repeat. Good telegraphers were proud of that speed, and they knew each other by 'fist' — the small personal rhythm in a person's tapping, as recognisable down the wire as a voice on the phone. They worked in post offices, in railway stations (where the telegraph told each station where the trains were, which is why so many stations had one), in newspaper offices, on ships, and in armies. It is worth telling students that this was one of the early technical jobs that women in America and Britain could get, and that some deaf people did it very well, since the key can be felt as well as heard. About the word itself: 'telegrapher' is the usual American form, and 'telegraphist' is the more usual British one. They mean the same thing. You will also see 'telegraph operator', which is plainer and very common. The job is gone now, so like 'telegram', the word almost always lives in the past tense or in history books.

電報員／報務員（發報的人）。美式多用 telegrapher，英式多用 telegraphist。