Telegram for America 1951 Western Union Telegraph Company

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Promotional film for Western Union Telegraph Company, featuring its history, current practice and emerging technology.'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Union

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Western Union Company is an American worldwide financial services and communications company. Its headquarters is in Denver, Colorado. Up until it discontinued the service in 2006, Western Union was globally the best-known American company in the business of exchanging telegrams.[4][5]

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

Western Union, as an industrialized monopoly, dominated the American 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...

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 bought out smaller companies rapidly, and by 1860 its lines reached from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, and from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. In 1861 it opened the first transcontinental telegraph. In 1865 it formed the Russian–American Telegraph in an attempt to link America to Europe, via Alaska, into Siberia, to Moscow (This project was abandoned in 1867). The company enjoyed phenomenal growth during the next few years. Under the leadership of presidents Jeptha Wade and William Orton its capitalization rose from $385,700 in 1858 to $41 million in 1876. However it was top-heavy with stock issues, and faced growing competition from several firms, especially the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company—itself taken over by financier Jay Gould in 1875. In 1881 Gould took control of Western Union.

It introduced the first stock ticker in 1866, and a standardized time service in 1870. The next year, 1871, the company introduced its money transfer service, based on its extensive telegraph network. In 1879, Western Union left the telephone business, settling a patent lawsuit with Bell Telephone Company. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, money transfer would become its primary business.

When the Dow Jones Transportation Average stock market index for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was created in 1884, Western Union was one of the original eleven all-American companies tracked.

By 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines and two international undersea cables.

20th century

In 1913 AT&T, under indictment of the Sherman Act, sold its shares in Western Union due to the threat of antitrust action.

The company continued to grow, acquiring more than 500 smaller competitors. Its monopoly power was almost complete in 1943 when it bought Postal Telegraph, Inc., its chief rival.

In 1914, Western Union offered the first charge card for consumers; in 1923 it introduced teletypewriters to join its branches. Singing telegrams followed in 1933, intercity fax in 1935, and commercial intercity microwave communications in 1943. In 1958, it began offering Telex service to customers in New York City. In honor of Valentine's Day 1959, Western Union introduced the Candygram, a box of chocolates accompanying a telegram featured in a commercial with the rotund Don Wilson. On the 1970s version of Let's Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall, Western Union Candygrams (with a cash message inside) were offered to contestants as a prize during a deal. In 1964, Western Union initiated a transcontinental microwave system to replace land lines...