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Western Union Ends Telegram Services 223

Posted by samzenpus from the first-my-8-tracks-now-this dept.
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."
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Western Union Ends Telegram Services More

Western Union Ends Telegram Services

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  • Necrodendrology (Score:4, Interesting)

    by (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1) ( 868173 ) <1.61803phi@gmail.com> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:05AM (#14624783) Homepage
    Telegrams [westernunion.com], interestingly enough, aren't the last way to wire dead trees; the USPS [usps.com] will also take PDFs and convert them into post.

    Just like voice and proximity have something over email, there's a kind of concretion in the physical missal.

  • Heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:06AM (#14624788) Homepage
    Telegram Services STOP.

  • 1/27/06 (Score:2, Insightful)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 )
    ...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.

    • Re:1/27/06 (Score:3, Funny)

      by nick-less ( 307628 )
      ..is a very important date in Telecommunications.

      Yep, now we`ll be surely doomed when SKYNET comes online...
      • SkyPager- I still remember the number- 1-800-759-7243. But you still don't know my PIN...
        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)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      In the UK, BT stopped doing telegrams a few years back. I don't know the exact date. I read how to send them in the 1997 telephone book and was surprised that they still existed but when I went to check in the 2003 edition that page had gone and there was no mention on their web site.

      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)

        by Imsdal ( 930595 )
        I was about to say that they disappeared in Sweden about five years ago as well, but some research showed that Telia, the state owned phone company, still (or, probably, again) offers them. They are now branded "Luxury Telegrams" and cost SEK 245 (USD$30).

        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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I will miss the telegram. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:07AM (#14624798)
    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..."

  • Last telegram received... (Score:5, Funny)

    by marevan ( 846115 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:09AM (#14624806)
    Dear Western Union, stop. Would you please, please, stop.

  • Just great.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by erktrek ( 473476 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:10AM (#14624811)
    Now how are we supposed to coordinate the counter attack against the aliens?

  • Ug (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:12AM (#14624819) Homepage Journal

    I only hope [stop]
    that they do not [stop]
    end their exciting [stop]
    telegraph service [stop]

    • Re:Ug (Score:2)

      by Speare ( 84249 )
      Cute joke, but "stop" was the word used to indicate a period. Long before it became trendy to call it a "dot," the punctuation we call a period has also been called a stop or a full stop. You wouldn't use "stop" in the middle of a sentence.

  • still a use (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Balthisar ( 649688 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:17AM (#14624856) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:still a use (Score:3, Informative)

      by slashname3 ( 739398 )
      Today most people have cell phones. Text messaging directly to people would replace telegrams.

      • I think his point is that his Army buddy was not the sort of person who would have a cell phone.

        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
        • In the UK, you can get a pre-pay SIM for free and a cheap 'phone for next to nothing (really - people tend to upgrade every year or two, so if you look for a 3-4 year old handset people are practically giving them away). You then just have to pay for your calls. Last time I looked at telegram prices (they discontinued them in the UK a few years back), they were more than a (cheap) phone and several hours of talk time are today.

          Basically, anyone can afford a mobile over here if they only use it to recei

    • Or hire one of the dancing monkey-suit people or a clown to sing a song about not being able to make the plane.

      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)

    by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:18AM (#14624862) Journal
    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 [arrl.org] that explains proper formatting of a radio telgram.

  • Money Transfer experience (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:18AM (#14624863) Journal
    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.
    • Those guys over in Nigeria just love Western Union telegrams and money orders.

      Hope they get some help soon. Their ISP access costs for sending all those emails must be huge.
    • i find Xoom [xoom.com] to be cheaper than WU for the transfers i have to do, and they seem pretty reliable though i don't think they have as big a network of agents as WU.

  • Writing on the Wall (Score:5, Funny)

    by lbmouse ( 473316 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:19AM (#14624867) Homepage
    "...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 [wikipedia.org]?

  • It's a pity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jetxee ( 940811 )
    I belive, that there is still a lot of places in the world with neither e-mail nor fax. But one could send a telegram there. Is it easier now to communicate with those people?

    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)

    by simong ( 32944 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:29AM (#14624911) Homepage
    and switched to Telemessages, which were Telex based with overnight delivery. Business telemessage services are still in the hands of BT Accurate [telemessage.co.uk] but the personal service was sold off in 2003. What now for Telex though?
    • Are you completely sure about that? I read about telegrams in the 1997 telephone directory - I recall being surprised that they still existed then - and so they were definitely still in operation less than a decade ago, although very expensive and presumably not sent using traditional technology.

  • Retro-Gram (Score:4, Informative)

    by boustrophedon ( 139901 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:29AM (#14624914)
    Retro-Gram [retro-gram.com] 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.

  • They recently killed their "BidPay" service, (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ellis D. Tripp ( 755736 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:31AM (#14624922) Homepage
    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...
    • I wasn't aware of this -- thanks for the heads-up.

      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
      • As a buyer I was always suspicious of BidPay due to the Western Union branding. I've seen a fair number of (obvious) scam auctions where Western Union was the only accepted way of paying.

        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

  • Astronomers - What will they do? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:34AM (#14624940) Homepage
    It used to be that the telegram was the official stamp for announcing discoveries. It didn't matter if you'd been studing some speck and talking about it on the phone for years if someone else sent out the telegram first that he'd discovered comet Waldo.

    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 .. .."

  • Slashdot's junk filter won't allow me to post a witty comment in morse code. (Not that I'd have a particularly witty comment anyways.)

    Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
    • Well, you could try posting in baudot; that's what they've been using for a lot of years anyway.
      Remember the shift-up and shift-down codes.
  • 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.
  • STOP with all the telegramming!

  • Telegrams as a Novelty (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Whafro ( 193881 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:47AM (#14625027) Homepage
    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.
    • Agreed. My non-techie girlfriend randomly came up with the idea to send me a Western Union telegram a few months back, thanking me for such a fun weekend.

      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)

    by fracai ( 796392 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:49AM (#14625034)
    Now how am I going to hear what Doc has been up to?!

  • Other alternatives, but are they legal? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dcnjoe60 ( 682885 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @09:52AM (#14625052)
    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.
  • My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though."
    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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
  • STOP WITH THE UNFUNNY JOKES STOP

    random garbage inserted here to pass the steaming pile that is the lame filter

  • OMG! What of the Pony Express? (Score:3, Funny)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @10:18AM (#14625307) Homepage
    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.

  • sue (Score:3, Funny)

    by glsunder ( 241984 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @10:32AM (#14625476)
    If they were truely a modern company, they'd sue everyone who used the modern tech instead.
  • to have known about this in advance. I would like to have sent a telegram to a certain 12 year old that I know if nothing else so that someone of that generation would have known what a telegram was. It's already getting hard to find things like rotary dialed phones. It freaks kids out when they see my first cell phone (the brick), especially when most of them never knew of a time when cell phones were toys of the rich, much less a time when they didn't exist at all.

    Now, if only we could make dial-up m

  • Thank God we still have (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @10:39AM (#14625534) Homepage Journal
    Telex [wikipedia.org].

    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.
  • By Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, from their best record, Dazzle Ships. Oddly prophetic...

    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)

    by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:08AM (#14625835)
    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.
    • 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 cou
  • What I'd like to know, for the record, is the text of the very last telegram.

    The first [loc.gov] was sent on May 24th, 1844 from Washington DC to Baltimore, and read:

    "What hath God wrought?".

  • the telegraph was a precursor to the Internet in that it allowed rapid communication, for the first time, across great distances.

    To say nothing of the fact that it consisted of digital signalling (Morse code) on wires (and later over the air).

  • It should go into the history books, too.

    Maybe "You've been running around with my wife and bringing her home late STOP"

  • I WILL MISS WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM SERVICE --STOP-- NEVER USED IT --STOP-- ONLY SAW USED IN OLD MOVIES STOP LIKE BLAZING SADDLES --STOP-- CANDY GRAM FOR MONGO --STOP-- FUCKIN' HILARIOUS --STOP--







    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
  • ms is that they are Transport Independent.
    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.
  • You can also get telegrams delivered by Eastern Onion [easternonion.com]. Their service may be less suitable for urgent messages, but the Western Union's service level had gone down substantially since the 1960s too.
  • My hunch is that modern USPS and overnight delivery services did the most damage, though.

    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)

    by Cliff Stoll ( 242915 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @10:07PM (#14631828) Homepage
    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.

    Well, I wound up as bicycle telegram delivery boy. I covered downtown Buffalo five days a week.

    The office runs weren't hard ... 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.

    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 only tip I collected that summer.

    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 ... never face to face.

    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 ... 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!

      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 ... may those canary yellow telegrams age gracefully.

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