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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.
What is interesting however, is that telgraphs were able to send information long distances over wires... sort of reminds me of, um, the internet.
Technology eveolves, and paying tribute to earlier tech that made our current tech possible is a worthwhile endeavor. Wasn't it Einstein who said of I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants...
Seriously- imagine what it must have been like to see a stock ticker for the first time in the late 1800s. I am not sure what it would compare to today, but it must have been amazing.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
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 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)
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.
Two things: First, the telegraph was the first binary "digital" device. It communicated information using dots and dashes.
Second, I last sent a telegram about six years ago when a friend of mine finished up her PhD. Western Union knocked on the door of her victory party and hand delivered it. She was flabbergasted, had never gotten one before, and none of her friends had ever seen one. She still has it in a frame. I don't know of anybody that's got any bit of email I've ever sent them in a frame.
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.
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!
I don't know if this service is being discontinued as well, but Western Union used to offer the ability for a person to type in a message, and have it hand-delivered to his Congressperson. It was fairly expensive, but I'm told reasonably popular when you really wanted to make a statement.
Given that I can't find any information about it on their site anymore, I'm going to guess it's been discontinued.
Probably given that most politicians are less adverse to email now than they used to be (particularly with the new post-9/11 and post-anthrax security precautions), the demand for it didn't exist anymore. But until recently, it was widely believed -- and perhaps is still true -- that sending your opinion by email just didn't give it the impact that a piece of paper did; especially a piece of paper that everyone knew you spent quite a bit of money sending, like a telegram.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.
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!
Actually, you could actually type up the telegram message online, and have it delivered to the specified address.
Perhaps if Western Union had done some more advertising about this service (particularly weddings, celebrations), they wouldn't have had to cancel it.
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 ?
Do telegrams still exist in other countries? The only reason they carried on for so long in the UK was that you used to receive a telegram from the Queen on your 100th birthday (now you get a letter). Is the USA the last place to abandon them, or does your Networking and Telecomm professor (somewhat ironically) not realise that there is a world outside the USA?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Telegrams cost a LOT of money. I looked into sending one a few years back, and it was about the same cost as an Express Mail envelope - $10. You don't get much spam/junk sent via express mail either, I bet.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
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.
You are technically correct... most telegraphs were ternary devices. However, I should point out that this was only a function of the character mapping done in Morse code. It is possible to use a telegraph in binary mode (only dots and dashes, with no extra symbol denoting the end of a character) through Huffman coding.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
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
The last telegram that I recieved was when I lived in Brazil about 20 years ago. Where I was living there was a government bureaucracy from hell that governed the establishment of telephone service, and you had to get on a waiting list that was often as long as 10-15 years worth of waiting before you got your telephone connection. As a result, telegrams were a fairly standard method of communication for short messages... especially between other Americans when the exchange rate was quite favorable.
You could send the messages from the local post office, and if you paid for priority courrier service there would be a messenger who would ride a motorcycle to your doorway and hand deliver the message, even in the evening. Like a previous poster mentioned, telegrams were very convienient to send messages when the reciever didn't have any sort of electronic decryption or reception equipment.
I tried to send a telegram message to the USA as a Christmas message, but the cost of going through Western Union was so incredibly high (about $50 even with the exchange rate) that I said forget about it. That was close to a three weeks of living expenses including housing, clothing, and food for me at the time and while I was living there.