Western Union and Hollywood

"What hath God wrought!" Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrated his telegraph invention in the U.S. Capitol in 1844.

Founded in 1851 to extend America's nascent telegraph network westward from New York to the Missisippi River, the nation's premier communications company changed its name to Western Union in 1856.

Western Union built the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, replacing thepony express.

Invented for Western Union by Thomas A. Edison in 1870, the universal stock ticker was the key to the creation of a nationwide securities market.

The familiar Morse Key, connected to a clickingsounder at a distant location, was the basic means of a telegraph transmission from the mid-nineteenth century through World War I.

Fifteen thousand strong at its peak, the uniformed Western Union messenger force was a ubiquitous American presance until the end of World War II.

More than 4000 company offices afforded public access to Western Union in the first half of the twentieth century.

Teleprinters that printed characters on gummed tape, which was pasted onto yellow message blanks, became the principal method of receiving Western Union telegrams beginning in the 1920's.

Young women known as "roote aids" transferred messages from one relay circuit to another on roller skates in major Western Union centers for several decades.

Developed by Western Union in the 1930s, DeskFax was the first large-scale commercial application of facsimile technology, with more than 50000 units in service in customers offices during the 1950s.

From wire to Westar! The wire lines that stretched from pole to pole for more than a century gave way to space-age transmission when Western Union launched America's first domestic communications satellites in the 1970s.

Reaching out from its U.S. base to more than 150 countries around the globe, in the 1990s Western Union became the fastest way to send money worldwide.