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."

Necrodendrology

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.

Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology

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?

Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology

"In other news, has anyone on Slashdot EVER written a friendly letter (attempted seduction counts) and sent it by snail mail?"

What do you think people did before email access was first available to
Joe Geek in the early 90s? Shout really loud?

Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology

National postal services can still provide a mark of integrity. In the U.K., although not the U.S., writing a letter to yourself can be used as an argument of prior authorship [snopes.com]. Also, registered mail with a return receipt actually works in the US Postal S

Re:Information vs. proof. Re:Necrodendrology

"In other news, has anyone on Slashdot EVER written a friendly letter (attempted seduction counts) and sent it by snail mail?"

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

Telegram Services STOP.

1/27/06

...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

..is a very important date in Telecommunications.

Yep, now we`ll be surely doomed when SKYNET comes online...

Re:1/27/06

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, bo

Re:1/27/06

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 wa

I will miss the telegram.

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...

Dear Western Union, stop. Would you please, please, stop.

Just great..

Now how are we supposed to coordinate the counter attack against the aliens?

Ug

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

still a use

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

Today most people have cell phones. Text messaging directly to people would replace telegrams.

Radio telegrams

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

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.

Re:Money Transfer experience

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.

Re:Money Transfer experience

bank transfer (my bank charges me somewhere between 12-15 EUR plus the Sender has to pay an additionals 12-15 EUR)

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 predic

Writing on the Wall

"...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

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

BT ended the UK Telegram service in 1982

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?

Retro-Gram

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,

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...

Re:They recently killed their "BidPay" service,

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 o

Re:They recently killed their "BidPay" service,

Well there are the electronic gold currencies. E-gold [e-gold.com] is the original and the most popular so far, but there is also pecunix [pecunix.com] which can issue cryptographically non-repudiable reciepts. There are also a couple others, e-bullion, (which claims more rigorous

Astronomers - What will they do?

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 .. .."

Re:Astronomers - What will they do?

Here's the page for the IAU: Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams [harvard.edu] which explains how to submit discoveries. (IAU = International Astronomical Union.) They seem to have gone to email mainly, and yes, spam is a problem. Text only messages please! (Submi

Telegrams as a Novelty

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.

BttF

Now how am I going to hear what Doc has been up to?!

Other alternatives, but are they legal?

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.

OMG! What of the Pony Express?

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

If they were truely a modern company, they'd sue everyone who used the modern tech instead.

Thank God we still have

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.

Have you seen a telegram lately?

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.

Re:Have you seen a telegram lately?

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 l

My first job - delivering Western Union Telegrams

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.

Re:how long

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.

Re:how long

It was Newton who first said that, and he meant it as a cruel joke against a short man.

It was Newton

He said it as a put-down to his rival Hooke, who was of little physical height and notable shortness.

Re:how long

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.

Framed email.

I had an email in a frame once, but then I closed the browser...

Re:how long

> First, the telegraph was the first binary "digital" device. It communicated information using dots and dashes.

Wrong. It uses dots, dashes, and pauses. If you don't pause between letters, they blur together and the meaning becomes ambiguous. .... cou

Re:how long

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.

Re:how long

Don't worry- Western Union still handles the kind of transmissions that Congressmen pay attention to.

Re:how long

From the Western Union Money Transfer FAQ:

5. How much money can I send from westernunion.com ?

Initially, the maximum amount of money you can send online with a revolving 30-day period is $999.99. Once you have used the Western Union Money transfer servic

Re:OLD NEWS

Well it takes CowboyNeal a while to type in all those telegrams we send him.

Re:Telegram?

It must be the standard unit of measurement for weighing TV's

Telexes

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