And some adjusted their sails – episode three

Western Union

This story starts in the year 1851 with the formation of a financial and Communication Company by a group of businessmen, notable among them Hiram Siley named “The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company”.

During the first five years of existence, the company went aggressively acquiring other competitors. On 8 April 1856, the name of the company was changed to “The Western Union Telegraph Company” to signify the union of “Western” telegraph lines under one system.

During the American civil war Hiram Siley took the challenge to connect the 2000 miles of telegraph lines to the far west. He succeeded in accomplishing a task that president Abraham Lincoln termed as “next to impossible”. By 1884, they had monopoly across the nation.

As other methods of telecommunications gained popularity over telegraphy, Western Union diversified its operation. It managed to retain the position of market leader during the 1960s and ‘70s with the Telex and TWX systems.

Later in the century, the advent of high-speed digital data transmission and modern fax machines supplanted some of the company’s most important services, notably telegrams, TWX, and Telex. In the face of these rapid technological changes, Western Union Telegraph Co. was reorganized as “Western Union Corp” in 1988 to handle money transfer and related services.

As the telegrams sent dropped to 20,000 a year, the telegraph services for Western Union ended in February 2006 after 155 years of continuous service. iTelegram, bought this business and continues to provide telegram, mail-gram and telex service to 49 countries (as of March 2019).

Western Union Corporation continue to be in the list of Fortune 500 companies with around 11,500 employees.  With more than 515,000 agent location in 200 countries, their revenue is over $4 billion. Western Union allow anyone with sufficient identification to send money around the world almost instantaneously.

Is this not a spectacular story of continuous innovating and evolving?