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Western Union sent its final telegram on January 27, 2006, ending a 150-year chapter in American communication.
The once-vital service that delivered messages through clicking telegraph wires had lost ground to phones, emails, and text messages.
Yet its influence endures in how we communicate today.
In 1844, Samuel Morse sat at a telegraph machine in Washington, D.C. and tapped out "What hath God wrought?"
The message traveled instantly through copper wire to Baltimore, proving that electric signals could transmit human thoughts across vast distances.
The telegraph's copper wires were soon ubiquitous across America's landscape.
Workers strung lines between wooden poles, connecting city to city.
By 1861, these wires reached from New York to California.
Newspaper editors could now print events from across the continent in their morning editions.
Military commanders directed troops hundreds of miles away.
Diplomats exchanged urgent messages with foreign capitals without waiting weeks for letters to arrive.
In 1925, a three-minute phone call from New York to San Francisco cost $18.50, while a telegram covering the same distance cost $1.20.
Americans sent 155 million telegrams that year, using Western Union offices in every town to transmit birth announcements, death notices, and daily business updates.
Telegram writers developed specific techniques to minimize costs.
Instead of "I arrived safely in Chicago," they wrote "ARRIVED CHICAGO STOP."
Rather than "Please send money immediately," they typed "SEND MONEY URGENT STOP."
This compression created unintended comedy—one famous misread telegram transformed "Mother in law dead stop funeral Tuesday stop" into a command: "Mother in law dead! Stop funeral Tuesday!"
In 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone at the World's Fair in Philadelphia, most Americans still relied on telegraph operators tapping out dots and dashes in Morse code.
The telephone transformed this dots-and-dash communication into actual human voice, carried through copper wires strung between cities.
Early telephone users, their ears still tuned to telegraph customs, would grip the wooden handset and bark "Ahoy!" into the cone-shaped mouthpiece.
Thomas Edison later shaped modern phone etiquette by advocating for "Hello" — a word that cut clearly through the static of early phone lines.
By 1930, black rotary phones with their spinning finger wheels sat on wooden side tables in 40% of American homes.
Still, Western Union's yellow telegram envelopes remained a common sight for urgent news until 1960.
On January 27, 2006, Western Union operators transmitted their final telegram, closing a chapter in American communication that began with Samuel Morse's dots and dashes in 1851.
India's telegram history continued longer.
At 11:30 PM on July 14, 2013, an operator in Delhi pressed the key for the last time, sending "Taar Zindabad" ("Long live the telegram") across the subcontinent's copper wires.
That final day, Indians crowded telegram offices nationwide, forming lines that stretched onto sidewalks.
They sent 20,000 messages—four times the usual 5,000 daily telegrams of that era.
Western Union charged 5 cents per word for telegrams in 1920, forcing writers to trim excess words.
This payment structure taught people to compress their messages into brief, essential statements - a practice that lives on in modern text messages and tweets.
In 2006, Western Union's final U.S. telegram traveled across copper wires to Tom Wolfe's Manhattan office.
Wolfe, who had spent his career documenting American cultural shifts, received this last pulse of Morse code while working at his desk, marking the end of an era that began in 1844 with Samuel Morse's first transmission.
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