Western Union Ends Telegram Services 223
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."
Necrodendrology (Score:4, Interesting)
Just like voice and proximity have something over email, there's a kind of concretion in the physical missal.
Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology (Score:2)
Yeah, sure. But then I am 41 years old. I pre-date email.
Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology (Score:3, Funny)
What do you think people did before email access was first available to
Joe Geek in the early 90s? Shout really loud?
Guilty as charged. (Score:2)
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.
That reminds me... (Score:2)
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."
Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology (Score:3, Interesting)
In the U.S. opening someone else's mail quickly e
Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology (Score:4, Funny)
Well, now that you mention it, it was less "letter" and more "book"... but I did get a bona fide letter from her lawyer via certified mail!
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:2)
1/27/06 (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:1/27/06 (Score:3, Funny)
Yep, now we`ll be surely doomed when SKYNET comes online...
Re:1/27/06 (Score:2)
There are many events that may be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but are still interesting. To some car fans, the last Camaro in 2002 is significant, both sentimentaly and for trivia purposes.
Maybe some of the young people here (I am assuming you are under 25 if you refer to your prof) have never seen a telegram. I have one framed at my house that my uncle sent my mom when I was born. Congratulations on
Re:1/27/06 (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:1/27/06 (Score:2, Informative)
They are still widely used at weddings where it is customary to send a telegram if you can't make it to the reception. They are never used for business purposes anymore, as the motifs available are all roses, wedding couples etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I will miss the telegram. (Score:5, Insightful)
"FROM NIGERIA STOP OPPORTUNITY FOR MONEY STOP PLEASE HLP ME STOP..."
Re:I will miss the telegram. (Score:2)
I guess that is the point here.
Re:I will miss the telegram. (Score:2, Interesting)
Last telegram received... (Score:5, Funny)
Just great.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just great.. (Score:2)
Back to the Future (Score:2)
Re:Back to the Future (Score:2)
Ug (Score:3, Funny)
I only hope [stop]
that they do not [stop]
end their exciting [stop]
telegraph service [stop]
Re:Ug (Score:2)
still a use (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:still a use (Score:3, Informative)
Re:still a use (Score:2)
I can believe this -- although they're ubiquitous among most of the people who have internet access, there are a lot of people who for one reason or another don't have them. I can imagine a lot of people in the military might not bother, if they're on their way out of the country. (Because the majority of US cellphones don't work internationally anyway, or only do for a really exorbitant fee.)
But not enough peopl
Re:still a use (Score:2)
Basically, anyone can afford a mobile over here if they only use it to recei
Re:still a use (Score:2)
Re:still a use (Score:2)
Re:still a use (Score:2)
So, essentially, we've given up traditional telegrams and they can now only be delivered by dancing people in monkey suits. And the world becomes just a little bit awesomer.
Radio telegrams (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Radio telegrams (Score:2)
You could set a handling instruction of HXB using short expiration times in hours (TTLs, essentially). Format multiple messages to the same source using varying TTLs, and you have yo
Traffic Handling (Score:2)
As a secondary goal it al
Re:Traffic Handling (Score:2)
Interestingly, some of the radiogram traffic gets routed through the internet as well. Hams have been linking
Money Transfer experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Money Transfer experience (Score:2)
Hope they get some help soon. Their ISP access costs for sending all those emails must be huge.
Re:Money Transfer experience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Money Transfer experience (Score:2)
Re:Money Transfer experience (Score:3, Insightful)
What REALLY pisses me off is that there's some additional middleman that takes a fairly decent chunk out of the transfer that can't be predicted - Overseas wire transfers always arrive $10-$25 short, even though my European client pays their bank's fee up front, and mine doesn't charge for receiving.
Anyone solved this problem, or learned to predict the charges?
Writing on the Wall (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org]?
It's a pity (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
BT ended the UK Telegram service in 1982 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BT ended the UK Telegram service in 1982 (Score:2)
Retro-Gram (Score:4, Informative)
They recently killed their "BidPay" service, (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They recently killed their "BidPay" service, (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't sold anything in a while, but back when I was doing it more actively, I really liked BidPay. I've never been a fan of PayPal since they started requiring you to "upgrade" (big fat sarcasm quotes on that, in case you didn't notice) to a Premier account to accept Credit Card payments. In return for this "feature," they take a percentage of all your incoming transfers -- regardless of whether or not it comes from a credit card -- from then on. And the
Re:They recently killed their "BidPay" service, (Score:2)
I'm not sure if it still exists, but NoChex used to be good. It cost a flat rate to put money into your account and take it out, so if you did a lot of business you could leave money with them for a while (they, of course, could invest it and get interest while you did this) and then transfer it all to your account in
Re:They recently killed their "BidPay" service, (Score:3, Informative)
The biggest weakness, IMO, of these services is that they are entirely dependent on the security of the user password, and therefore the client machine, to keep the stored value safe. So
Astronomers - What will they do? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 .. .."
Re:Astronomers - What will they do? (Score:3, Informative)
Damn! (Score:2)
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Re:Damn! (Score:2)
Remember the shift-up and shift-down codes.
Funny that I see this today. (Score:2, Interesting)
Note to self... (Score:2)
Telegrams as a Novelty (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Telegrams as a Novelty (Score:2)
Let me tell you -- that was the coolest thing I've ever gotten. I didn't even know they still did such things, and I'm even more thankful that she did it, now that they've discontinued the service.
I was hoping to pull it on someone when the opportunity arose. Now I'll just have to stick to the $2 bills.
BttF (Score:3, Funny)
Other alternatives, but are they legal? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What did them in.... (Score:2)
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.
Still doing well in Japan (Score:2, Interesting)
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
oh my god (Score:2)
random garbage inserted here to pass the steaming pile that is the lame filter
OMG! What of the Pony Express? (Score:3, Funny)
sue (Score:3, Funny)
It would have been nice.... (Score:2)
Now, if only we could make dial-up m
Thank God we still have (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
A Song for the Telegraph (Score:2)
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 i
Have you seen a telegram lately? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Have you seen a telegram lately? (Score:3, Interesting)
You cou
What I'd like to know, for the record (Score:2)
The first [loc.gov] was sent on May 24th, 1844 from Washington DC to Baltimore, and read:
"What hath God wrought?".
Re:What I'd like to know, for the record (Score:2)
proto-internet (Score:2)
To say nothing of the fact that it consisted of digital signalling (Morse code) on wires (and later over the air).
What did the last telegram say??? (Score:2)
Maybe "You've been running around with my wife and bringing her home late STOP"
WILL MISS IT --STOP-- (Score:2)
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
Transport Independent (Score:2)
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.
Western Union wasn't the only game in town. (Score:2)
yeah, probably (Score:2)
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.
My first job - delivering Western Union Telegrams (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:how long (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:how long (Score:3, Informative)
Re:how long (Score:2)
Re:how long (Score:2)
It was Newton (Score:3, Informative)
Re:how long (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Framed email. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:how long (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:how long (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:how long (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how long (Score:3, Funny)
With a limit like that, I t
Re:how long (Score:2)
Re:OLD NEWS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Telegram? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Telegram? (Score:2)
Bah, it's something these whippersnappers are using today, like hula hoops and fax machines. Why, give me a sweaty orphan on horseback being chased by p*ssed off Injuns any day of the week!
Re:Telegram? (Score:2)
Re:Blazing saddles :) (Score:2, Informative)
Telexes (Score:3, Informative)
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 [internationaltelex.com].
They claim that "Telex is still the only legally recognized method of sending an electronic message. Facsimile (Fax) and elect
Re:Revolution in comedy! (Score:2)
Ironically, Slashdot wants me to type the word "Mailman" to prove I am not a script.
Re:oh no! (Score:2)