As I read Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, there's a lot of talk of sending wires, the post, and evening papers. This makes me ask, what exactly are they talking about? How long would it take to send and receive "a wire"? Did I first have to take a hansom to an office? And how would the wire be delivered to the recipient?
A 'wire' is a colloquialism for a telegram. First you would have to deliver the desired message to the telegraph office, an operator would translate your message, typically into morse code but a few other systems were used, for transportation and send the message along. The amount of time necessary to send that over would depend on the skill of the operator and the length of the message. At the far end a second operator would need to turn your message back into words, once again the skill and length of the message would determine the time. Generally this message would then be posted to the intended recipient.
The exact amount of time required to deliver a message would therefor depend on the load on the system, the length of the message, the skills of the associated operators and the distance of the recipient from the telegraph office but generally you could be fairly sure that the recipient would get he message the same day or the day after it was sent.