I am wondering how one would go about sending telegrams in a wired fashion nowadays. Obviously, telegrams can be sent wirelessly using spark transmitters and antennas. But the legality of doing so is questionable and getting a ham license seems cumbersome,

I am assuming sending telegrams using wires would be legal since there would be no spamming of the electromagnetic spectrum. It would also be safer since the operators wouldn't be exposed to huge doses of radiation. Since wireless telegraph came about after wired telegraph, I know such a system exists.

Is there an inherent difference between telephone wires and telegraph wires? Can telegraph signals be sent over telephone wires, and vice versa? I ask because they seem very similar in design and we already have a nationwide system in place connecting every home that could be used for many purposes (i.e. today, the PSTN is used for DSL, telephone, fax, etc...)

Back in the day, was there a switching system for telegrams, or was a dedicated wire needed between every single node you wanted to communicate with, and only one message could be sent at a time?

If equipment existed to do this, could wired telegraphy be re-integrated into the PSTN using RJ11 (telephone) cables? For example, say I have a modern telegraph with an apparatus to pulse dial a number; any number can be dialed, but we obviously want to dial a telegraph, much like how fax machines dial fax machines. Once the other telegraph picks up (automatic), the Morse code can flow over the wire (it can either be manually keyed or sent by a computer somehow) and the receiving telegraph will both audibly spit out Morse code and also print out the message in case nobody is there at the moment.
This sounds like a neat idea to me, but I'm sure nothing like this exists. I just don't see any reason why such contraptions could not be. The infrastructure is great and already exists; a connection could be established to any household at will (that has a telegraph).

**Post Script**: Comments below seem to indicate that telegraph and telephone cables are largely the same. Does that mean that if there were both telegram and telephone wires on a pole, one would be unable to distinguish the two without tracing them?

And would there even *be* both telephone and telegraph lines on a pole? The telegraph came first - so I think it's fair to say that when telephone wires starting going up, telegram wires were already strung up in many places. **Did they repurpose some of these wires (obviously they could no longer be used for telegraph) or string along new wires?**