About Western Union

The Western Union Telegraph Company long operated a public message telegraph service in domestic and international markets with competition in both fields. In the early 1960s, the Company provided leased teletypewriter systems to the government and industry in addition to the basic telegram service, and it began marketing a teletypewriter exchange service called Telex that was compatible with international standards At that time it also constructed a nationwide microwave system for use in providing its services and built the first computerized store and forward message system called Autodin for the military.In the early 1980s, the Company was providing a diversity of telecommunications services that utilized its modernized plant. These included an exchange telephone service interconnect with the public network and an information service based on a business model similar at the time to that of Compuserve and AOL and operating on the Company's own packet switching network. It met most of its needs for long-haul transmission through its satellite and microwave systems, but it was dependent in most cases upon local telephone companies for the extension of lines from its own facilities to its customers' premises.

At that time, a change occurred in governmental policy towards telecommunications, primarily because of the breakup of ATT and the Bell System companies, and local facilities became much more expensive to obtain. Also, the cost of long distance communication was steadily declining, and use of facsimile transmissions through the switched telephone network appeared to threaten the long term viability of the Telex and TWX services.

These circumstances combined to force the Company into bankruptcy in the late 1980s. Most of its systems and services were divested by the Company in its struggle to survive. In the mid-1990s the corporate parent, which had been renamed The New Valley Corporation to protect the value of the Western Union name, retained only the public message service centered upon the telegram and mailgram message services from among the its earlier divisions. The public message service included a money transfer operation that was a modernized version of the telegraphed Money Order, which the Company had long provided. Financial markets placed a relatively high value upon the money transfer operation, primarily because of the growth visualized in the consumer market for forwarding cash from location to location, including internationally, and, accordingly, the division was renamed Western Union Financial Services. It was sold at auction by the Bankruptcy Court and was eventually acquired by the First Data Corporation. It has prospered since. It is headquartered in a Colorado, but maintains modern facility in a corporate campus in Montvale, NJ that primarily serves the computer systems group associated with the money transfer business.

The events associated with this last phase of the Company's history are described in the essay, Pathway to Oblivion, which can be viewed by clicking on the box at left above.