Western Union

The Western Union Company is an American financial services and communications company. Its North American headquarters is in Meridian, Colorado, though the postal designation of nearby Englewood is used in its mailing address. Up until it discontinued the service in 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S. company in the business of exchanging telegrams.

Western Union has several divisions, with products such as person-to-person money transfer, money orders, business payments and commercial services. They offered standard "Cablegrams", as well as more cheerful products such as Candygrams, Dollygrams, and Melodygrams.

Western Union, as an industrialized monopoly, dominated the telegraph industry in the late 19th century. It was the first communications empire and set a pattern for American-style communications businesses as they are known today.

History

19th century

In 1851, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was organized in Rochester, New York by Samuel L. Selden, Hiram Sibley, and others, with the goal of creating one great telegraph system with unified and efficient operations. Meanwhile, Ezra Cornell had bought back one of his bankrupt companies and renamed it the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company. Originally fierce competitors, by 1856 both groups were finally convinced that consolidation was their only alternative for progress. The merged company was named the Western Union Telegraph Company at Cornell's insistence, and Western Union was born.

Western Union (disambiguation)

Western Union is a communications company synonymous with the telegraph in the United States that, with the decline of demand, turned to providing financial services. The title may also refer to:

See also

Western Union (film)

Western Union is a 1941 American Western film directed by Fritz Lang and starring Robert Young, Randolph Scott, and Dean Jagger. Filmed in Technicolor on location in Arizona and Utah, Western Union is about a reformed outlaw who tries to make good by joining the team wiring the Great Plains for telegraph service in 1861. Conflicts arise between the man and his former gang, as well as between the team stringing the wires and the Native Americans through whose land the new lines must run. In this regard, the film is not historically accurate; the installation of telegraph wires was met with protest from no one.

The film is based on the novel Western Union by Zane Grey, although there are significant differences between the two plots.

Western Union was only the second western made by Lang, The Return of Frank James being the first in 1940. Both movies explore the conflicts and obstacles of former criminals trying to return to law-abiding society. And both films were complicated by the Hays Code, which stipulated strict moral conduct in films at the time.