Western Union

From Freepedia

Western Union is an American financial services and communications company.

Contents

History

Western Union was founded in Rochester, New York in 1851 as The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company.

After a series of acquisitions of competing companies by Jeptha Wade, the company changed its name to Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856 at the insistence of Ezra Cornell, one of the founders of Cornell University [1], to signify the joining of telegraph lines from the west to the east coast.

When the Dow Jones Transportation Average stock market index for the NYSE was created in 1884, Western Union was one of the original eleven companies tracked.

Western Union Innovations

Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. 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. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, money transfer would become its primary business.

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 to customers.

Western Union was also the first American telecommunications corporation to maintain its own fleet of geosynchronous communication satellites starting in 1974. The fleet of satellites, called Westar, carried communications within the Western Union company for telegram and mailgram message data to Western Union bureaus nationwide (as well as internal communications within the company), as well as traffic for its Telex and TWX (Telex II) services. The Westar satellites' transponders were also leased by other companies for relaying video, voice, data, and facsimile(fax) transmissions.

Western union was very involved in the Automatic Digital Network (AUTODIN). A related innovation was Western Union's computer based EasyLink service. Utilizing early internet based technology, this system allowed for one of the first marketable electronic mail systems. In addition, the system allowed the same message to be sent simultaneously to multiple recipients via email, fax, mailgram, or telex services; as well as receive messages from the integrated formats. With the service, users could also perform research utilizing its InfoLink application. EasyLink Services is now its own company.

Western Union, along with GTE (now Verizon), also established the Airfone service for phone calls aboard commercial passenger airline flights.

Other telecommunications service offerings

Along with satellite telecommunications, Western Union was also quite active in other forms of telecommunication services:

  • common carrier terrestrial microwave networks,
  • long distance telephone service
  • landline-based leased voice & data communication circuits
  • cellular phone service for a very short time in the early 1980s (the phones were made by 2-way radio manufacturer E.F. Johnson)
  • and early messaging networks such as TWX, which was acquired from AT&T (the founder of the TWX network) and renamed Telex II by Western Union, and Telex.

Changes in the company 1980s–Present

Due to declining profits and mounting debts, Western Union slowly began to divest itself of these telecommunications-based assets starting in the early 1980s.

As the Internet became an arena for commerce at the turn of the millennium, Western Union started its BidPay service to let consumers pay for auction wins at sites like eBay; the service provided a way to pay with one's credit card and deliver the payment as a money order to the recipient. BidPay was renamed "Western Union Auction Payments" in 2004 before being renamed to BidPay, and is currently a competitor to online payment systems like PayPal.

With increased competition especially from telephone and fax services, the only profitable division of the company over time was its Financial Services division. It is the only division of Western Union that exists today, and includes such services as wire money transfers.

Western Union as a brand name

Western Union was bought by First Financial Management Corporation in 1994, which merged with First Data Corporation in 1995.

Its North American headquarters are in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and its international and commercial services headquarters are in Paramus, New Jersey.

See also

  • MoneyGram - a competitor in the money transfer business

References

  1. ^  Ezra Cornell:A 19th Century Life – From the Cornell University Library Archives

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Western_Union.html"


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