
Technology You Didn't Know Still Existed: The Telegram - adrianhoward
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/telegrams
======
Animats
The present Western Union Money Transfer is not really a descendant of the the
Western Union Telegraph Company. It's more of a successor of First Data, the
payment systems company. Through a confusing series of mergers and selloffs in
the 1980s, involving about five companies, the money transfer business ended
up with the Western Union name.

The telegram business was incredibly low-volume by modern standards. In the
1970s, I visited Western Union's international message gateway in Mawah, NJ.
Most Atlantic international message traffic passed through a pair of UNIVAC
computers. One woman at a CRT terminal handled all mail bounces for
transatlantic traffic. About once a minute, she had a message to deal with.
The computers were not heavily loaded. The tape drive logging traffic for NSA
wrote a block every few seconds.

~~~
joezydeco
Post-Telegram, Western Union also had a business into the 1980s with the
Mailgram. Mailgrams used satellite transmission to send messages to local
centers, where it would be printed out and sent via US Mail.

Let's also not forget FedEx's failed ZapMail system, which was faxed documents
delivered locally by Federal Express trucks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail)

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dsr_
Oh! That's what caused 60 Hudson St to be, err, 60 Hudson.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Hudson_Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Hudson_Street)

A ridiculously high percentage of the Internet flows through that building,
which was once Western Union's HQ.

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schiffern
The part about Oscar Wilde reminds me of another story of attribution, relayed
by Dr Jerry Pournelle:
[http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view24...](http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view246.html)

> _Someone recently asked about the origin of the description of DC /X as
> "landing on a tail of fire the way God and Robert Heinlein intended rockets
> should land."_

> _Although I 've used that often, it's a case similar to the time when
> someone at dinner said something clever, Oscar Wilde said "I wish I'd said
> that," and someone else said "Don't worry, Oscar, by tomorrow you will
> have." The origin is Dr. Arlan Andrews..._

I would assume Oscar Wilde never said that either. :)

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denzil_correa
India officially shut its Telegram service 2 years ago [0]. I was nostalgic
and used the last day to send a few telegrams to my family and dear ones
[1,2].

[0]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/1018046...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/10180463/India-
sends-its-last-telegram.-Stop.html)

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/7GDi8oN.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7GDi8oN.jpg)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/OmAhXoB.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/OmAhXoB.jpg)

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mgkimsal
I lamented on Facebook that I regretted never receiving a telegram in my life.
Having grown up watching people in movies and TV getting telegrams, by the
time I hit adulthood, the age of telegrams was largely gone.

A few weeks later, I received a telegram - a friend on Facebook found a
service that still does telegrams, and I got it. I think it was rather
expensive, but the gesture was still appreciated :)

~~~
ahazred8ta
You can print your own fake telegram as a gift. This is an editable PDF of a
classic 1930s Western Union telegraph form.
[http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram3.ht...](http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram3.html)
-also-
[http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram1.ht...](http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/propdocs/PropTelegram1.html)

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lordnacho
I remember my dad taking me to send a telegram when I was a kid in the 1980s.
He told me it was paid by the word, so since he was writing in Vietnamese he'd
just join them up and nobody would know any better. Can this be true?

~~~
kryptiskt
People used to use telegraph ciphers that abbreviated common phrases with
unusual words to pay less. The real words was a feature as the telegraph
company was suspicious about balderdash, and there was no reason to optimize
for character count as it was paid per word (or rather a fixed fee + word fee
so it never got cheap).

An example:
[http://archive.org/stream/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog#page/n3/...](http://archive.org/stream/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog#page/n3/mode/2up)

where "Acceptance paid into bank, cannot be withdrawn" becomes abjectio in an
early example.

More tragic (under Births): "Confined yesterday, Twins, one alive, a girl,
Mother not expected to to live" becomes annexus.

~~~
lbhnact
Poignant example. Life use to be much, much less easy.

Excellent link as well, thanks.

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tomjen3
If you can find somebody to deliver a telegram, chances are that you can get
in contact with just about anybody other than the president by sending them a
telegram.

Think about it - if you receive a telegram would you throw it away or read it?

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peter303
Towards the end telegrams in the USA were for classy messages. I got an
admission acceptance to Stanford grad school via telegram. A couple of job
offers too. Ironically the deliver was usually the post office.

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SN76477
` Gosh, I hope hipsters do not discover this.

