[GreenKeys] Information about Western Union Telegraph Company

[Russmill47 at aol.com]

jhhaynes wrote:
 
"...Well you would be a good one to answer some of Richard Youl's  questions
then.  He was asking me about some of the endings of W.U.  activities.
I guess the end of Plan 21-A switching more or less coincided  with 
closing a lot of offices and converting them to agencies? And  using the 
central computer to handle all the messages.  And what happened  to Telex and TWX? 
Did AT&T acquire them?
And the end of the telegram business happen all at once, or was it  gradual? 
Just recently I got a Mailgram, so I guess the money transfer  company that 
bought the W.U. name will still do Mailgram and telegram business  if you really 
want them to..."
 
 
As I remember, all reperforator operations were phased out in the  
mid-1970's.  Reperf at the agency locations and at the central locations,  such as 
Philadelphia, was a manual operation that was high in errors and very  expensive as 
the United Telegraph Worker salaries increased. It was the paper  tape 
equivalent of the manual telephone switchboard.  I can still remember  the sounds 
and the smell of the hundreds of tape readers and reperforators on  the second 
floor of the Western Union building in Philadelphia.
 
The automated service that replaced the torn tape system was called  
Infomaster with computer systems located in Middletown, Va. and Bridgeton,  Mo.
 
I left the company a few years before but I do know that the local lop  costs 
that Western Union was paying to the local telephone companies was very  
high.  I worked on the projects where we installed high speed TDM  concentrator 
equipment close to each telephone company local exchange to keep  the leased 
local lines as short as possible, with the LEC boundary. Apparently  this project 
and the project to modernize the Telex and TWX central office  switching 
equipment were too little to late.  Fax was cheaper and easier  with no need for 
expensive wiring back to the Western Union Central  Office.
 
I think that AT&T acquired a service called EasyLink, one of the  original 
e-mail services in the States.  This would have occurred in the  late 1980s. 
EasyLink was an attempt to use the plain old telephone system  (POTS) versus 
continuing to use the expensive leased lines for Telex and  TWX.
 
 
The decline of the telegram was gradual. But, you can still send  telegrams. 
Once Western Union decreased the size of the agencies and cut  staff, 
telegrams were delivered by the post office.  Once that happened,  there was little 
difference between a telegram and a letter. So, you can  still send a telegram 
today.  One other thing, telegrams were used a lot  during W.W.II in the States 
to inform the family that there child had died  in battle.  As a result, 
people of a certain age used to associate  Telegrams with death notices. Not the 
best image for the service from a  marketing perspective.
 
 
Yes, you are correct.  First Data still runs the money order business  as 
well as the remains of the Mailgram and telegram business.
 
   
Russ Miller
WA3FRP