Representatives from 20 European states signed the International Telegraph Convention, establishing standardized rules, equipment compatibility, and tariffs for telegraph messages crossing national borders. The resulting International Telegraph Union, predecessor to today's International Telecommunication Union, became one of history's first truly global regulatory bodies, later inspiring the celebration of World Telecommunication Day each May 17.
By the 1860s, telegraph networks crisscrossed Europe, but each country operated its own systems with incompatible codes, rates, and technical standards, making international messaging slow and expensive. A message crossing several borders might need retranscription at every frontier, introducing delays and errors that frustrated the era's growing appetite for rapid information.
Delegates meeting in Paris hammered out common technical standards and simplified tariff structures, allowing messages to flow more freely across the continent. The convention adopted Morse code as an international standard and established the Bureau International des Administrations Télégraphiques to administer ongoing cooperation, an early prototype for the intergovernmental bureaucracies that would proliferate in the 20th century.
The organization survived the telegraph's obsolescence, evolving to oversee international telephone standards, radio spectrum allocation, and eventually satellite and internet governance as the International Telecommunication Union, now a specialized agency of the United Nations headquartered in Geneva. Its founding in 1865 makes it, by some reckonings, the oldest existing international organization, older even than the Red Cross.