Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/technology/06telegram.html

February 6, 2006
Telegram Falls Silent Stop Era Ends Stop
By SHELLY FREIERMAN

Sometime on Friday, Jan. 27, Western Union, bowing to the ascendancy of modern technology like e-mail, sent its last telegram.

Western Union had its beginnings in 1851 in Rochester. Messages were transmitted by Morse code over wire, then hand-delivered by a courier. Ten years later, the company completed the first transcontinental telegraph line.

That drove the Pony Express, which had been operating for less than two years, out of business by offering customers delivery of a message across the country in less than a day (the average Pony Express delivery took 10 days). In the relatively recent era of e-mail and instant messaging, telegrams were usually delivered by overnight courier services.

A sampling of some of the last telegrams wired on the last day included birthday wishes and efforts by a few people, probably Western Union employees, to send the final message. The company had no information about the time of the very last message or the cities it bridged. At the height of business in 1929, more than 200 million telegrams were sent around the world. Just under 21,000 were sent last year.

Western Union's core business has long been money transfers, which the company first began offering in 1871. The service allows people to send any amount of cash to family members, bypassing banks. To handle the transfers, the company has 271,000 locations ― 80 percent of them outside the United States ― in more than 200 countries.

If money transfer services and business communications were central to Western Union's portfolio, it was the telegram message that captured the popular imagination.

Personal news, births, deaths and travel itineraries were wired around the world. Telegrams, which customers paid for by the word, developed a syntax all their own, with short phrases and the use of the word "stop" to end sentences.

For decades, telegrams were the fastest and most cost-efficient way to communicate, and organizations of every kind used them. At one point, according to Amy Fischer, the company historian for Western Union, employees would attend major sporting events, sending play-by-play via a telegraph machine to an announcer at a radio station. "The Yankee announcer would stay in New York and call the game from there," she said.

When Jane Finerman, 68, of New York City and Boca Raton, Fla., was married for the first time in 1959 she received several telegrams of congratulations, as did her current husband, Carl Hutman, 72, when he married his first wife in 1964. By the time the couple married in 1998, telegrams were a thing of the past.

"You sent them to mark important events like a birth or wedding," Ms. Finerman said. "My oldest child, who is 45, would remember them. The younger ones wouldn't have a clue."

First Data Corporation, which acquired Western Union Financial Services as a subsidiary of the First Financial Management Corporation in 1995, announced on Jan. 26 that it would spin off the company later this year.

Western Union also offers money orders, bill payment and prepaid products like telephone service and Internet access. Person-to-person money transfers may go the way of the telegram, however, as Internet-based banking becomes more personal and diverse.