[GreenKeys] SMECC NEEDS PADS OF TELEGRAM FORMS FOR DISPLAY WU AND RCA Both!...

[Jim Haynes]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2016, Richard Knoppow wrote:

>   My memory of telegrams is that the forms were a sort of tanish yellow. 
> Very old memory.
>   While wire telegraph work is being discussed rather than radio the "other" 
> radio service, MacKay seems not to have been mentioned. MacKay was associated 
> with Postal Telegraph and later W.U.
>
There's a book "The Telegraph: a History of Morse's Invention and its
Predecessors in the United States" by Lewis Coe.  I consider this a 
complement to "The Story of Telecommunications" by George Oslin.  Oslin
writes from a Western Union standpoint - he was their P.R. man for many
years - and Coe seems to be writing from a Postal viewpoint.  There
are a lot of amusing stories in both books.  He tells of the elder
Mackay who made a fortune in the Comstock Lode and married an opera
singer there.  Pretty soon she decided Virginia City was too small for
her and moved to Paris.  Mr. Mackay was running his business from New
York and traveling to Paris to be with his wife.  In Paris he encountered
a newspaper man, Bennett, who was there running his paper remotely by
cablegrams.  Bennett was at odds with Jay Gould, who had control of
Western Union and the cable business, so he suggested that Mackay should
lay a cable to complete with Gould. Mackay did so, but then had trouble
getting messages to and from his cables via W.U., so he started Postal
Telegraph.  Jay Gould said Mackay was one man he could never beat because
Mackay could at any time just dig up another million dollars in his silver
mines.

Of course that time was just about the peak for the telegraph business, 
which went downhill from then on.  The nation couldn't even support one 
telegraph company, let alone two.  Postal Telegraph came to be owned by 
ITT, and it was long felt by W.U. that ITT had a favored position with the 
U.S. government.  At first the government would not allow the two 
companies to merge, but in 1943 Postal was in suce dire straits that 
Congress brought about a shotgun wedding of the two.  W.U. was the 
surviving company but assumed some heavy burdens in the form of Postal's 
debt and employees and their pension obligations.  W.U. did get some good 
people out of the deal though, including engineer Gilbert Vernam and 
executive Walter Marshall, who became President of W.U.