What Hath God Wrought?
Feb. 1st, 2006 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gridloreSTOP: Western Union Scraps Telegrams After 155 Years
I kn ow that telegrams are a buggy-whip technology, but a piece of American history has just vanished.
Bet you didn't know that a warning from Washington to Pearl Harbor to expect an imminent attack was sent by Western Union. And the person who sent it didn't bother to pay for rush delivery. So the message was delivered three hours after the attack. History doesn't report on the tip the delivery boy got.
Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.
The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has itself been supplanted over the last half-century by cheap long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.``Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services,'' said the notice. ``We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.''
The terse notice, confirmed today by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village, Colorado, unit of First DataCorp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by ``STOP,''which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.
I kn ow that telegrams are a buggy-whip technology, but a piece of American history has just vanished.
Bet you didn't know that a warning from Washington to Pearl Harbor to expect an imminent attack was sent by Western Union. And the person who sent it didn't bother to pay for rush delivery. So the message was delivered three hours after the attack. History doesn't report on the tip the delivery boy got.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2006 02:05 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2006 02:30 (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Feb 2006 00:21 (UTC)Gessi