Why did periods cost more on telegrams rather than full sized letters?
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It’s not that periods cost more than full sized letters. It’s that you couldn’t send periods or punctuation at all.
Telegraph operators only had codes for letters/numbers originally, and while many lines may have used extra codes and allowed punctuation some other line might not or only support some subset of punctuation particularly with international stuff. So just letters only ended up being standard.
As such punctuation got spelled out. STOP for end of sentence, COMMA for comma etc. And so to send a period you spent money for a whole word. Though eventually places stopped charging for punctuation.
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