From The "While You Were Sleeping Department"

I received only one telegram in my life. In 1965, a field operative for the Cetnral Intelligence Agency sent me a telegram. I sought employment with The Company in 1963, but the Kennedy Assassination and LBJ's hiring freeze put me on hold. I went on with my life and was poised to launch my so-called teaching career in 1965. I called and said no thanks to this retired general with a voice that sounded as if he gargled with razor blades. That ended my relationship with The Company. Nam had heated up and I guess The Company needed more spooks. Our intelligence community has problems enough without a secret agent man like me. If this is a (fair & balanced) revelation, so be it.

[x New York Sun]
Telegrams Are History Stop End of Era Stop
By Stephen Miller

ON SATURDAY COMMA WESTERN UNION DELIVERED ITS LAST TELEGRAM STOP THE END OF THE 155 HYPHEN YEAR HYPHEN OLD SERVICE WAS ANNOUNCED WITH BRIEF NOTE ON WESTERN UNION APOSTROPHE S WEB SITE COLON QUOTE EFFECTIVE JANUARY 27 COMMA 2006 COMMA WESTERN UNION WILL DISCONTINUE ALL TELEGRAM AND COMMERCIAL MESSAGING SERVICES STOP ENDQUOTE

Thus (were it put in cablese), died, with a whimper, the innovation that kicked off the information revolution leading (in some cases indirectly) to the telephone, radio, television, and ultimately the Internet, an ungrateful descendant that killed its forebear.

"Discontinuing this service completes our transformation into a financial services company," Victor Chayet, vice-president for communications at Western Union, said in a telephone interview. "We saw this coming a long time ago."

Western Union's involvement in finance dates to 1866, when it began sending prices to brokers via the automatic stock ticker. It started money wiring services a few years later. In the 1890s, it pioneered international money transfer, now its most popular feature, used more than 275 million times a year in 200 countries.

Coincidentally, First Data, Western Union's parent company, announced last week that it would spin off Western Union, its profitable subsidiary, later this year.

It was the latest episode in a history that stretches from the days of the Pony Express and the Civil War, when the telegraph reached the Pacific and became the first great business communication technology.

"If you will sit down with me in my office for 20 minutes, I will show you what the condition of business is at any given time in any locality in the United States," William Orton, president of Western Union, told a congressional committee in 1870. "The fact is, the telegraph lives upon commerce."

He might well have said commerce lived on the telegraph, which carried news from suppliers to consumers across the continent with such precision that Orton could tell that Midwest grain harvest was down that year just from the volume of messages.

"At its height in the late 19th century, Western Union's telegraph network was the nervous system of American business, just like the Internet is today," Tom Standage, author of "The Victorian Internet," told the Sun in an email interview.

Like the Internet, telegraphy was where bright young people (including some women) got bootstrapped into great fortunes. Samuel Morse, buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, held early patents on the technology. Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie got their starts as telegraph operators, and one of Edison's early successes was a two-way telegraph.

Governments had relied on the telegraph since at least the Crimean War in 1854, when it allowed leaders in London to keep in direct contact with their commanders in the field. William Tecumseh Sherman in 1884 signaled his reluctance to run for high office to the Republican National Convention with his famous declaration, which he wired, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."

The most notorious telegram in history was probably the Zimmerman Telegram of 1917, which contained details of a proposed military alliance between Germany and Mexico. When decoded and publicized, the telegram helped galvanize American public opinion to enter World War I on the side of the Allies.

Telegraph technology improved dramatically in the first decades of the 20th century with the development of the teletype, which automatically decoded messages, and of multiplexing, which allowed multiple messages to be sent at the same time over one wire. Its use exploded even with the rise of the telephone, especially for long-distance calls, where rates stayed high. Telegrams entered popular culture as dramatic devices in plays and films, delivered by uniformed messenger boys (their uniforms were first deployed in 1911). Soon came diversified marketing - pre-written romantic overtures (with each pre-written phrase keyed to an internal Western Union code number), Candygrams, and so forth.

But perhaps most intriguing was the telegram's role in mid-century politics. "Telegrams were the crucial currency of democratic politics in the 20th century," Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and the forthcoming Nixonland said, via telephone. They served as overnight polls, but in a tangible form. George Wallace liked to push piles of yellow telegrams at reporters to demonstrate the popularity of his segregationist views.

Richard Nixon, fighting to stay on the 1952 Republican ticket as candidate for vice-president said in his "Checkers" speech, "Wire and write the Republican National Committee whether you think I should stay on or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision, I will abide by it."

The resulting blizzard of supportive telegrams convinced Ike to keep Nixon on the ticket, Mr. Perlstein said.

In recent years, the telegram was rumored already dead, and even Mr. Standage, author of "The Victorian Internet," expressed surprise that it was still alive. It was a pale imitation of its glory days, though, a pale-yellow overnight letter delivered by courier service; the flashy motorbikes and tight uniforms went out decades ago.

Today we get our messages (pace the Patriot Act) without human mediation. But not much faster; a telegraphed message flashed from coast to coast over wires at pretty close to the speed of light, too. Today we miss the "stop" written out at the end of each teletyped line, the distinctive yellow paper, romantic traces now found only in archives of a revolutionary technology of a former age.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Sun

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