Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Telegrams go the way of dialing telephone

Bradley Keoun And Elizabeth Hester, Bloomberg News

Published February 2, 2006 at midnight

Text size  

More More Business

More stories »

STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.

The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has itself been supplanted over the past half-century by cheap long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services," said the notice. "We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage."

The terse notice, confirmed Wednesday by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the unit of Greenwood Village-based First Data Corp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by "STOP," which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.

Western Union employees were informed of the decision in mid-January, one operator said Wednesday.

"My aunt sent me a telegram when I turned 16, when I graduated from high school and went to the convent, where I didn't stay, of course," said the operator, who gave her name only as Marilyn. "And I still have it."

Western Union, which now primarily transmits money from about 270,000 locations in more than 200 countries and territories, ended the service a day after First Data said last Thursday that it will spin off the company. Western Union may be valued as a public company at more than $20 billion.

"The telegram was the last remaining bit of our telecommunications heritage and doesn't really fit with where we are moving forward as a financial services company to the world," Chayet said.

Western Union, founded in 1855 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Co., built the first transcontinental telegraph line during the Civil War and in 1866 introduced the ticker system that supplied New York Stock Exchange prices to brokers around the country.

Funded by a $30,000 grant from Congress, inventor Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. It read, "What hath God Wrought?"

"It was the beginning of the telecommunications age," said Leonard Bruno, who oversees a collection of Morse's papers as science manuscript specialist at the Library of Congress.

Telegraph lines crossed the American continent beginning in 1861 and the Atlantic Ocean in 1866.

"I'm surprised it's (telegrams) lasted this long," said Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. "Communications have moved from snail-mail time to real time."