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Western Union Ends Telegram Services
Snap E Tom writes "As of this past Friday, Western Union has stopped sending telegrams. The article cites factors such as long distance telephone and faxes that contributed to its demise, but email was the final nail. My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though."
Just like voice and proximity have something over email, there's a kind of concretion in the physical missal.
how long has this service been disgustingly obsolete?
Telegram Services STOP.
...is a very important date in Telecommunications.
My Networking and Telecomm prof says it's about as important as the eventual day when the last car manufacturer will announce they have ceased production of gasoline-powered vehicles.
What middleman is better known for facilitating the illegal acquisition of funds? If only they would stop their money transfer service also.
I never, EVER received a spam/junk telegram. Ever. There's something kind of nice about a message transmission medium that has never been trashed.
"FROM NIGERIA STOP OPPORTUNITY FOR MONEY STOP PLEASE HLP ME STOP..."
Dear Western Union, stop. Would you please, please, stop.
Now how are we supposed to coordinate the counter attack against the aliens?
I only hope [stop]
that they do not [stop]
end their exciting [stop]
telegraph service [stop]
Trolling is a art,
Good one. I wonder how many people will get the joke.
I didn't know you could still send a telegram through western Union. Whenever I think of Western Union I think of Money orders. But since there are no more Telegrams being sent over the wire... Does that mean the Pony Express is going to be taken out too?1 Say it ain't SO!
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
Well it takes CowboyNeal a while to type in all those telegrams we send him.
For a long time, telegrams have actually been sent by teletype. The last time I saw a telegraph key in use commercially on a landline was in my grandfather's office (he was a railroad dispatcher) in the 1950s.
When I got my first teaching job in the 1960s the law said that job offers for teachers had to be by telegram. Given the nature of the lawmaking process, I bet that law is still on the books.
I do hope they keep the telegraph system alive for a few more years though. I'm in the middle of a download of a .mov file of Apple's "1984" Macintosh commercial through the telegraph system. I'm hoping to see the download complete sometime in late 2007.
I can see there being very reduced demand, but some demand still. Probably just not enough to justify the investment.
I sent a telegram once. I was a kiddie in the Army, and I'd just left advanced training. I was on leave prior to going to Germany. Because I live in Michigan and a buddy going on the same plane lived in Ohio on the way to the airport in Pittsburg, we'd agreed to meet at his house so I could tag along. I broke my leg, though, and couldn't make the flight. I got everything straightened out with the Army, but not with my buddy, who didn't have a telephone (and wouldn't, I imagine, have internet access today). Of course I had his address, so the only way I could get a hold of him was via a Western Union telegram.
I guess these days you could send flowers with "call me" just as fast as a telegram. Or hire one of the dancing monkey-suit people or a clown to sing a song about not being able to make the plane.
I think there's still a demand today to be met, and possibly it can be done with a reduced infrastructure. Not everyone has internet access, and even so, as things are today you have to check the internet; it doesn't notify you. Heck, even *I* don't have a home telephone.
--Jim (me)
Western union may have ended thier telegram service, but radio telegrams are still alive and well. Amateur radio service still uses RTs in emergency communications. The art of "traffic handling" as it's called is still encouraged by the ARRL. Here's a document that explains proper formatting of a radio telgram.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I had need to send somebody this month and they requested that I use Western Union. I was so surprised. Online it would have cost me a C$40 service fee and it appears that it would have done a cash advance on my credit card. I went to an office and it cost a flat rate of C$20 and I used by debit card. Still a ripoff if you ask me. But I looked around and could find and alternatives for non-Internet savvy people on the receiving end. The guy got the money.
"...factors such as long distance telephone..."
Another example of how modern technology is undermining core business plans. You'd think they would've seen the writing on the wall... in, oh lets say, 1875?
For WU it is business optimization, for most of us it does not matter much, but to tell the truth, there seems to be less opportunity now.
and switched to Telemessages, which were Telex based with overnight delivery. Business telemessage services are still in the hands of BT Accurate but the personal service was sold off in 2003. What now for Telex though?
Retro-Gram provides the style and class of vintage telegrams with the speed and convenience of e-mail. Their free service will format your message as PDF in any of a half dozen vintage telegram formats and send it by email. For a fee, they will print your Retro-Gram and send it by snail mail.
as well, presumably due to competition by PayPal. Too bad, as it was a good way to accept international eBay auction payments without PayPal fees or having to go to a Western Union outlet to collect the money...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
"Telegram for Mongo" :)
"Telegram for Mongo"
So how do they do it officially now? By email would seem to have the danger that some punk astro-spammers will take credit for everything by sending out email with slight variations "have discovered comet at .. ..", "have dis-c0vered comet at .. ..", "have d1scov3red komet at .. ..", "have d1scov3red komet V1agr4 at .. .."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What is a telegram?
Oh well, what the hell...
Slashdot's junk filter won't allow me to post a witty comment in morse code. (Not that I'd have a particularly witty comment anyways.)
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
My roommate just sent a telegram last night. He needed to cancel something he ordered to avoid getting ripped off but he had to send the cancel order within 3 days of ordering. Well he just found out after the post office closed on the third day that what he ordered was crap so the fastest way to cancel the order that day was by telegram.
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
STOP with all the telegramming!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Bad comedians will no longer be able to telegraph joke punchlines!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've sent several telegrams over the last few years... it's a great way to acknowledge a special event (birthday, anniversary, whatever) on short notice, it gets hand-delivered, it's not as corny as most greeting cards, it's relatively inexpensive, it shows some effort, and, most importantly, it's relatively unique these days.
I'll miss having that option, as I always got responses like "wow, that's so cool-- I'd never gotten a telegram before!"
Hopefully, someone else will pick it up, acknowledging its novelty value and marketing it effectively as such, but Western Union really had the old-school image that made it especially attractive for me.
Now how am I going to hear what Doc has been up to?!
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
I used telegrams a lot in my previous job (I was an operations representative for one of the largest ocean vessel transportation agency). We switched to MCI because Western Union was too expensive.
Thankfully most ocean cargo vessels are switching to email and satellite telephone services, so telegraphs (that eventually become radiograms) are being replaced by cheaper services (BTW its still expensive, just not as expensive).
I still remember my telegram callback...
Brgds,
Bill
Opinions expressed in this posting are not of my current employer, nor should it be consider official communications.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
One thing that telegrams had in their favor is that most statutes recognized them as legal communications and based on the date they were sent. Many corporate bylaws include notice of meetings, etc. via mail and telegram. While the other alternatives mentioned, particularly email may be more convienent and faster, from a legal point of view, they may not stand the same ground (of course statutes and bylaws can be amended). However, one thing that a telegram would get you that an email won't is a dated receipt from a third party to prove the message was sent. With email, it is all to easy to spoof the headers to make them say whatever and their isn't any independent verification that it was received (even return receipts aren't universal and can still be spoofed).
While I agree with other posters about other mediums being more efficient, there are still reasons to use less efficient means. Otherwise, the USPS would be out of business, too.
My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though."
In an interview I heard yesterday the reason Western Telegram gave was cheap long distance calls, cheap and easy to get cell phones and cheap and easy to get to e-mail.
Well, not Western Union, but telegrams are still in wide use in Japan. No, not because people don't have phones (everyone seems to have a land line, a cell phone or two, and a high-speed internet connection these days) but because telegrams are used in a traditional way.
In the old days people that couldn't make it to a wedding customarily sent a greeting telegram to wherever it was the wedding or wedding party was to take place. That custom alone has been kept alive, and people still send telegrams, even though there are better alternatives. It's become somewhat of a tradition. Usually a wedding ceremony will get anywhere between 10 to 50 telegrams. So on Saturdays and Sundays, the telegram deliverers are quite busy!
I don't know if the network still exists, but the last time I looked into it, there was still a lot of infrastructure set up to handle telexes, especially internationally.
I just did a quick Google and it seems that International Telex (that's Telex with a capital T, as opposed to 'telex' as the generic term) has either changed its or been bought out by somebody else called Citycomm.
They claim that "Telex is still the only legally recognized method of sending an electronic message. Facsimile (Fax) and electronic mail (E-mail), contrary to popular belief, do not constitute a legal document. Telex messages are used in the banking and brokerage industry to electronically confirm billions of dollars in financial transactions daily."
So I guess the market is pretty safe, for now anyway.
What I can't figure out is whether the telex networks that used to exist are still around anymore. It seems easy to believe that they just got absorbed into the Internet, but they were pretty interesting when they were operating. I don't pretend to understand it completely, but it was a separate system from regular voice phone lines, and Telex numbers (I think) had a different number of digits. I still have business cards of my father's that list a Telex number, although not with me to look at right now.
It seems like the telex systems used now are just operating on the regular PSTN network, similar to fax machines.
If anybody here uses telex services today and wants to comment on how they work, I'd be interested in what the situation is like.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...from the the Wikipedia page on telegraphy:
...perhaps because of this:
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Information vs. proof.
Email and Faxes killed the Telegram. That's because a telegram serves the simple purpose convey information to a person. That means if someone wants to know when your passport expires or the personal details in that document. A simple fax or emailed scan or telegram of that info is sufficient.
If however you need to get a Visa put in by a country that doesn't have an embassy near your home you have to send the actual document by overnight mail or currier service.
So yes. While Email will eventually kill of faxes too. It won't bother snail mail much more than it already has.
In other news, has anyone on Slashdot EVER written a friendly letter (attempted seduction counts) and sent it by snail mail?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Coming from the tele/datacommunications industry, I can safely state that I believe this to be of historical signifigance. After 145 years of service, Western Union has ended it's telegram services. Telegrams, staking their origins in telegraphy, the singing wire and morse code were truly fundamental catalysts in the industrial revoloution. It was the technology that led to the telephone, the semi-conductor, the facimile, the computer and high speed communications. We should collectively take our hats off and bow our heads. "What hath God wrought". Rest in peace, the telegram.
:-(
Most of you insensitive clods should learn your history and be thankful to Western Union that you even have jobs.
I'm a ham also, and a few years ago I heard somebody talking about a project to send a bunch of test messages into the traffic handling system and analyze them to come up with ways to improve the way large batches of messages are handled and routed in an emergency. They were going to use the same sort of analysis methods that are used to optimize distributed-hub networks like retail distribution and UPS. (This was their area, not mine -- I don't remember any more technical details.)
As a secondary goal it also would have created some metrics to use in discussing Amateur Radio emergency traffic handling with homeland security types. (e.g., "Most messages reach their destination in x hours," etc.)
I thought it was a pretty neat idea -- of course I'm not sure whether the people that work the nets would really appreciate getting flooded with 10,000 essentially garbage messages, but I appreciated the concept anyway. I never heard if there was any attempt made to do anything with it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
STOP WITH THE UNFUNNY JOKES STOP
random garbage inserted here to pass the steaming pile that is the lame filter
First Telegrams, what next? I fear the Pony Express is targetted for elimination at the hands of "progress" and "technology." What is this world coming to!? When my grandfather died at the ripe old age of 46, he told me something that I'll never forget... ...if only I could remember what that was.
Not only that, what if someone travels back in time and needs to send a message to the future? Huh? Doc needs you Western Union!
If they were truely a modern company, they'd sue everyone who used the modern tech instead.
to have known about this in advance. I would like to have sent a telegram to a certain 12 year old that I know if nothing else so that someone of that generation would have known what a telegram was. It's already getting hard to find things like rotary dialed phones. It freaks kids out when they see my first cell phone (the brick), especially when most of them never knew of a time when cell phones were toys of the rich, much less a time when they didn't exist at all.
Now, if only we could make dial-up modems a thing of the past - I wouldn't miss those one bit.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Telex.
By the way, anybody else hear the story about how Hemingway created his writing style by sending telegrams? He was a war correspondent, and his editor was continually bitching about the cost of telegrams.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...with which my computer used to communicate a message to me last night when I tried to overclock it a wee bit much.
What will Doc do when he needs to send a message to the future to marty!!!!
Telegraph
Ive got a telegraph in my hand.
Words on paper, written in sand.
Weve got telegraph, right across this land.
It doesnt mean a damn thing.
We dont understand.
But who needs telegraph anyway?
We've got telegraph, right across this land.
It doesnt mean a damn thing. (damn thing)
We dont understand, (we never understood!)
Gods got a telegraph on his side.
It makes Him powerful, gives Him pride.
Even in America (God bless America!)
They understand the value of the telegraph.
Hand in hand, (hand in hand)
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I sent a telegram as a novelty to my girlfriend many years ago; what she got wasn't the yellowish paper adorned with logos and glued letters, but a dot matrix printout. It was about as unglamorous as you could get. Yes, it did say Western Union on it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if they hadn't already been using the internet to transmit it.
All in all, it was truly a telegram in name only (had to pay, fill out a form, etc). It totally lacked any of the style or magic you may have expected.
"Hmm, what if email cost the sender money IF read, but the reader could easily and optionally refund the money back to the sender."
I'm glad that none of these ideas has ever caught on at all. The idea that anyone who is not involved in spamming at all have to shell out any money like this (even if it is supposed to come back) is a very bad idea.
A teenager in my area has setup an email service for older folks that works similar to telegraphs. He sets up email addresses for people too old/stubborn to use it, and then prints out and hand delivers all the non-spam messages they get. One retirement village pays him $800 a month for the service. Old tech dies hard.
It seems a bit strange to realize that that abbreviations that everyone thinks was invented with the advent of the internet ("R" = "are", etc) were actually used around seventy years ago.
What I'd like to know, for the record, is the text of the very last telegram.
The first was sent on May 24th, 1844 from Washington DC to Baltimore, and read:
"What hath God wrought?".
To say nothing of the fact that it consisted of digital signalling (Morse code) on wires (and later over the air).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I had an email in a frame once, but then I closed the browser...
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
On a related note.....
Effective February 3rd, 2006 there will be no more email. The companies that run the internet have decided that "email is simply no longer relevant in today's modern world." Due to this fact, it was recently decided that email communication is simply not a viable means of communication. Sorry for any inconvenience.
He said it as a put-down to his rival Hooke, who was of little physical height and notable shortness.
Maybe "You've been running around with my wife and bringing her home late STOP"
has anyone on Slashdot EVER written a friendly letter (attempted seduction counts) and sent it by snail mail
Heh, I'm reminded of Dostoyevsky's (I think it was Dostoyevsky) comment:
"I've written poetry
In pusuit of seduction
That is,
For the sake of a worthy cause."
Just junk food for thought...
I understand that the average mode of communication has changed from my generation and the last,(I'm 26). We still do know what telegrams and snail mail is like. When I got my first PC I didn't know but 3 other people that had one and only one of them was online. I still had to snail mail to everyone. I have even used a telegram, I have friends overseas and a telegram was a neat way to get in touch and was faster than snail mail. Just because you are in your twenties doesn't mean you don't what STOP means at the end of a sentence or have not mailed something with the post office. Just my 2 bits.
WTF?
I WILL MISS WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM SERVICE --STOP-- NEVER USED IT --STOP-- ONLY SAW USED IN OLD MOVIES STOP LIKE BLAZING SADDLES --STOP-- CANDY GRAM FOR MONGO --STOP-- FUCKIN' HILARIOUS --STOP--
damn. it won't let me post my lame-ass joke because i used too many caps. how retarded is that. who knew that slashdot had a lameness filter? it mustn't work very well because i see lame posts all the time. roland piquepaille comes to mind. anyway i'm typing as many lower case letters as possible to get past their lameness filter. ok. looks like I can post it now after previewing.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Stop! Stop.
Yes, I have written letters.
Yes, I have shouted really loud.
But my most-successfull strategy was to climb on the top of a 12-store building and howl all night long. Go figure.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
ms is that they are Transport Independent.
Maybe Western Union emails them or phones them to their local office then maybe they phone, fax, email, hand deliver or carrier pigeon the message the last few miles. It is (was) cool because a company is ensuring your message is delivered.
If the guy doesn't answer the phone, then they hand deliver it or they could use FedEx even. Its like have a secretary. Too bad its gone.
You can also get telegrams delivered by Eastern Onion. Their service may be less suitable for urgent messages, but the Western Union's service level had gone down substantially since the 1960s too.
My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though.
At first, I thought the submitter was nuts. Telegrams are like email, right? Surely email, fax, and phone killed demand for telegrams. But no. Telegrams served a different market. A telegram is a message delivered in less than a day to a physical address where there is no receiving equipment.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Stupid "Lameness" filter. been trying 15 minutes to get this crap to work. The quippiness has since left me and now i'm bitter. Add Morse code to the damn drop down already.
The vast majority of telegrams ever sent were never encoded in Morse. They were sent using a teletype, probably using 5-bit BAUDOT, or more rarely, ASCII or any of the other encoding schemes that have fallen by the wayside.
I'm not sure if I would argue that they were the first digital communications medium or not, but I just thought it's just worth pointing out that most Western Union Telegrams had nothing to do with the CW electrical telegraph that they're so closely associated with.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When I was in Brazil, Ten years ago, my Syster in Law had her first baby. I couldn't use a phone, communications were poor, and the fastest way to send congratulations was an international telegram. Sure it was expensive, but it's in the little rug-rat's baby book to this day.
I was laid off by telegram in the early '90s. Glad to know that will never happen again...
When I got married, I had my best man do the traditional thing and send a congratulatory telegram to my father-in-law (at an exorbitant price). They phoned in the message, then mailed the telegram....
He still has it though.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The strippers couldn't dance or sing, and rarely took their clothes off.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I thought these died out years ago!
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
No jokes about a post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner and a group of ragtag teenage revolutionaries?
I feeling hungry for some ass... donkey! I meant DONKEY!
If you rearrange the letters of "Western Union," you get "No Wire Unsent." Too bad that's no longer true.
If you want to contact dead friends or relatives, your options are limited. It appears as though you can send them a telegram however.
AT&T took over Telex service in 1991, which was the last real Western Union volume business. The WU international switching center in Paramus NJ lived on until at least 1996, but was phased out then.
The telegraph had the same effect in its era as the Internet in ours. It could speed information around the world immediately. 31 years before telegraph colonel Andrew Jackson fought the battle of New Orleans against the British A WEEK AFTER the 1812 War peace treaty had been signed because it took that long for treaty news to get from Paris to Louisiana.
The telegraph did have a doozy of a "last hundred yards" bottleneck. Perhaps tens of thousands of people would share the same terminus. So the system of telegrams was devised to multiplex messaging.
I received some telegrams in the 1980s as "extraodinary messages". At that time there grad schools and employers competing for my application. A few would send telegrams to get my attention.
I write and receive "friendly letters" rather often. Email is fine and all, but there are some times when only a letter will do -- especially when the person you want to communicate with doesn't have email. For instance, my niece lives on the other side of the country. When her family moved out there, she was only three. So I sent her letters every week to keep in touch. And she dictated letters to her mother to send to me. Twelve years later, we still write each other a few times a month. She just got an email account right before Christmas, but we still take the time to write real letters. There is nothing better than going to the mail box and seeing a letter addressed to you that is not an ad or a bill!
Plus, it allows me to indulge in my stationery habit. Half of the drawers in my roll top desk are full of different writing paper for all occasions! I even go inside the post office to buy cool stamps for my letters. There are much cooler ones out there than the standard flags that help to make the envelopes more interesting.
The telegram is not gone... although, it's true that if I or anyone else I've ever known wanted to send a telegram ( uh, why? to make an impact? Then I'd send a stripper or flowers or a guy in a bunny suit as well... anyway... ) well, unless I wanted one of the special types of telegram I just mentioned, I'd think "Western Union". Now, I'd have to search for one of these alternate services.
Obviously, someone looked at the business and noticed, hey! We're not making *any* money providing this service! Screw that!
I'm frankly shocked it didn't happen 15 years ago. Sometimes people do let sentimentality get in the way of rational business decisions.
I never, EVER received a spam/junk telegram. Ever.
There's not a doubt in my mind that the telegram, at its height, was used for scamming (it likely was too expensive for extensive spam-use however.) A quick google search finds this article .
I thought they went out in the 1950's ??
Why didn't they just convert the STOPs to periods when typing them up / printing them out / whatever?
It was summer of 1967, when I applied to Western Union for a summer job. Since I knew Morse Code, I figured they'd have a telegraph position for me. Heck, I could send and receive 25 words a minute.
... a quick sprint into an office, hand a yellow envelope to the secretary, catch the elevator to the next floor, and do it again. Thick envelopes meant money-orders; night-letters were cheap, and high priority telegrams had red stamps on the front.
... the only tip I collected that summer.
... never face to face.
... 5 channel baudot code meant telegrams came out in uppercase only. The stuff ran at 60 words per minute (or about 25 baud, I think) No parity. They had a staff of guys that just repaired and oiled the clunkers. And clunk they did -- these were loud!
... may those canary yellow telegrams age gracefully.
Well, I wound up as bicycle telegram delivery boy. I covered downtown Buffalo five days a week.
The office runs weren't hard
Hey - I delivered candy-grams. Marriage proposals. And once delivered a notice that a man had won the New York Lottery (Federal laws prevented these from being sent by mail). The guy tipped me a quarter
The worst were the eviction notices, delivered to indigent individuals and sometimes families. I'd bike over to a tenement building where the Western Union delivery boy was a most unwelcome visitor. The slumlords dealt with their tenants through process servers, lawyers, and telegraph agents
Then there was the killed-in-action notice of the GI in Viet Nam. I'm seventeen and I'm supposed to deliver this telegram to his mom. My boss - a stogie smoker who played the ponies - took pity on me and delivered it himself. Poor guy returned a wreck: the woman completely broke down at the news. (This was common enough that Western Union had instructions on how to deliver death notices)
Over the summer, I was immersed in Western-Union's electronics. Or should I say their electro-mechanics. Hundreds of Type 28 ASR teletypes, reperforators, and paper-tape systems
At Christmas, teletype operators would pass along jingle bell messages to each other by sending teletype Control-G symbols at just the right intervals. Heck - they sent out time signals to local businesses who needed synchronized clocks.
So good bye Western Union
Now he'll never get the message that Doc is alive and well in the wild west!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So who was the last telegram from? To? What did it say!?!?
The internet took away this business model and made it irrelevant. So why did Western Union not do like the recording industry, and start suing everybody for using E-mail. Start up their own little RIAA, or do they really understand when something is dead of old age, it makes sense to take it off life support.
Your sister Rose is dead!
"He was a wise man who invented beer." - Plato