Western Union telegram – STOP.
With no fanfare, Western Union Financial Services last week sent its final telegram, ending a 155-year-old service that marked important events in the lives of millions of people around the world.
The last 10 Western Union messages that were sent Friday included birthday wishes, a birth notice, condolences on a death, and several people attempting to make history by sending the last Western Union telegram, said Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village-based company, a subsidiary of First Data Corp.
“Telegrams represent the last vestigial part of the company that we were,” Chayet said.
Discontinuing the $10 service marked the company’s last step in transforming itself from a communications company to a financial services provider, he said.
Telegrams have declined in popularity since long-distance telephone calls replaced telegraphs as the preferred method of communicating over long distances. Faxes, a Western Union invention, and e-mail accelerated the decline in more recent decades.
In the peak year of 1929, Western Union sent 200 million telegrams through a network of more than 1,400 messengers. Western Union sent about 20,000 telegrams through the postal system for next-day delivery last year, Chayet said.
Messaging services made up the majority of Western Union’s revenues until 1965, said Warren Bechtel, who started with the company in the 1960s and is now retired.
“For 87 years, the Western Union telegram service has been in a long, inexorable decline,” Bechtel said. “Mercifully, the end has been reached.”
By the 1980s, Western Union had staked its future on money- transfer services, which it introduced in 1871 and now dominates, with more than 270,000 agent locations around the globe.
Western Union stopped using telegraphs years ago and ended same-day telegram delivery in 2000, Chayet said.
Telegrams are still a legal necessity in certain situations, primarily to break business contracts, said Clint Kennedy, operations manager at Las Vegas- based American Telegram, the only other U.S. company besides Western Union authorized by the federal government to provide valid telegrams.
“Western Union is making so much money on money transfer, I don’t think they care anymore about it,” Kennedy said.
But Chayet said the company’s decision to drop its messaging service wasn’t easy because of its “rich history.”
The telegram services coincidentally ended a day after First Data said it would spin Western Union into a separate public company, Chayet said.
Western Union started in 1851 as the Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Co. and became the Western Union Telegraph Co. in 1856 after acquiring several competing systems. By 1861, the company created a coast- to-coast network of lines and would dominate telegraph transmissions for decades.
“Most people from our generation have never gotten one (a telegram) or will never get one,” said Sean Branney, a former Denver resident in his late 30s who started Retro- Gram.com, an online provider of nostalgic telegrams.
Telegrams changed people’s lives and American English as well. Because telegraph companies charged by the word, telegrams placed a premium on crisp, declarative writing, he said.
Western Union’s messaging services were based in St. Louis. Only a handful of employees still worked in messaging services, including two operators who called people up and sang them birthday greetings, Chayet said.
Western Union also discontinued singing telegrams, an innovation dating from 1933, on Friday.
“We will raise a glass and toast the passing of the Western Union telegram,” Branney said.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-820-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
Famous telegram exchange
Before the opening of his play “Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw telegraphed Winston Churchill: AM RESERVING TWO TICKETS FOR YOU FOR MY PREMIERE. COME AND BRING A FRIEND IF YOU HAVE ANY.
To which Churchill replied: IMPOSSIBLE TO BE PRESENT FOR THE FIRST PERFORMANCE. WILL ATTEND THE SECOND IF THERE IS ONE.
