WESTERN UNION WRITES END TO ERA STOP

Western Union's telegram service, which effectively replaced the Pony Express 150 years ago, itself came to an end January 12 - replaced by low-cost telephone services and email - when the company quietly laid off the last 30 people engaged in delivering telegram messages. There's no record of the last telegram's contents - the first, composed by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, read "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?"

Telegrams reached their peak popularity in the 1920s and 1930s [reaching a peak 200 million messages in 1929] when it was cheaper to send a telegram than to place a long distance telephone call. People would save money by using the word "stop" instead of periods to end sentences because punctuation was extra while the four character word was free.

Telegrams were used to announce the first flight in 1903 and the start of World War I. During World War II, the sight of a Western Union courier was feared because the War Department, the precursor to the Department of Defense, used the company to notify families of the death of their loved ones serving in the military.

And snarled circuits famously delayed a last-minute telegram warning of a possible attack on Pearl Harbor until after the attack had occured.

More about this story from MSNBC, Wired News, Computer World, and ZDNet.

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And speaking of STOP, Blogger advises there will be a "scheduled outage" for maintenance this evening between 7:00 and 8:00 PM (2/6). This maintenance won’t fix everything, but it will make things better. I promise," says whoever said it.

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