Instructed to answer in cablese — the telegraph operators' compressed dialect (drop the articles and filler, keep every fact) — a single one-sentence instruction, no examples and no codebook, elicits 40–49% fewer billed output tokens on the API's own meter, and models across four families still recover the information at full fidelity. For machine-to-machine traffic, that is half the output bill at any major API, today. The Victorian economics of the cable, reborn as token economics: the Telegraph Test benchmark.