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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.
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.
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,
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
It was Newton who first said that, and he meant it as a cruel joke against a short man.
Well it takes CowboyNeal a while to type in all those telegrams we send him.
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?
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.
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
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!
It must be the standard unit of measurement for weighing TV's
If this were really happening, what would you think?
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.
Now how am I going to hear what Doc has been up to?!
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
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!
That would be "Candygram for Mongo"!
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."
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 ?
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.
Don't worry- Western Union still handles the kind of transmissions that Congressmen pay attention to.
If they were truely a modern company, they'd sue everyone who used the modern tech instead.
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.
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.
I had an email in a frame once, but then I closed the browser...
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
He said it as a put-down to his rival Hooke, who was of little physical height and notable shortness.
> First, the telegraph was the first binary "digital" device. It communicated information using dots and dashes.
.... could be "eeee" or "h", for example.
Wrong. It uses dots, dashes, and pauses. If you don't pause between letters, they blur together and the meaning becomes ambiguous.
So it's not binary, it's tri-nary.
My other car is first.
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!
Actually, he said 'binary "digital" device', so it's unclear if he knew the difference between the terms. In common parlance binary and digital are used almost interchangeably.
Let's review:
Digital: Having only a finite set of symbols to choose from (as opposed to analog, which can have an infinite set of permissible values/signal levels/pulse shapes). By this definition, Morse code is clearly digital, even though the opportunities for doing fancy signal processing are limited.
Binary: A subset of digital, in which only two symbols are permitted. These symbols can be almost anything, really: a dot versus a dash, a 1 versus a 0, a higher frequency versus a lower one, etc.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
With a limit like that, I think you're pretty much stuck with buying interns.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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