Telegram for Mr. Elmer Fudd
Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union. — Samuel Goldwyn
After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company’s web site, if you click on “Telegrams” in the left-side navigation bar, you’re taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: “Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”
Several years ago, I wondered if one could still send a telegram. I looked it up on the Western Union site and saw that the price really wasn’t competitive with sending a document by FedEx, so I’m not surprised it’s gone the way of the passenger pigeon.
This is a sad blow for time travel stories, which have so often relied on people being able to reliably deliver messages decades in their future by Western Union. (SF writers will have to be more clever about it in the future.) And what’s poor Bugs Bunny to do?
American Telegram is still offering a telegram service, advertised alongside candygrams and balloongrams.
(Via Follow Me Here)
Are there really a lot of time travel stories in which people use Western Union in this fashion? The only one that comes to mind is BACK TO THE FUTURE II.
Posted by Ted on February 3 2006 23:35
OK, now that you're calling me on it, I'm hard-pressed to actually name one. Thinking harder about it, I'm coming up with vague recollections of leaving letters with law firms, but not Western Union.
Drat. Anyone else?
Posted by Zed on February 5 2006 17:42
And now that I think about it, people are still free to write time travel stories set in the past using Western Union. The only restriction is on writing stories where Western Union is used to deliver a telegram after 2006. I imagine a lot of people writing stories nowadays would use some other mechanism, like one of those "send e-mail at some future date" services.
Posted by Ted on February 6 2006 15:02