[GreenKeys] SMECC NEEDS PADS OF TELEGRAM FORMS FOR DISPLAY WU AND RCA Both!...

[Richard Knoppow]

     This sounds like a book worth having. I have a book on W.U. it 
points out that W.U. was the first truly national company. People thin, 
the railroads were the first large merged companies but none covered 
more than a region while W.U. covered the entire country. The book also 
points out that a lot of the financial maneuvering to get control of 
W.U. was really to obtain control of railroads. W.U. was never a 
profitable as people think.  I also have somewhere a business history of 
AT&T. It points out that at any time in its existence an investment in 
AT&T would have lost money in comparison to the average of industrial 
stocks on the NYSE.  The reason was the status as a regulated public 
utility and the capital intensity brought about by the need for constant 
maintenance and expansion. (Intensity is not the right word but I am 
drawing a blank on it). I think W.U. must have faced something similar 
plus it also had a large payroll.
     Its also interesting to look at transoceanic cable companies. Both 
W.U. and ITT were principles in this endeavor with many cables. I think 
its also interesting that successful voice cable over transoceanic 
distances came very late.  Of course now, with optical fiber cables 
provide enormous bandwidth and are more reliable than satellite.
     It is my understanding that W.U. survived for a long time because a 
telegram was cheaper than a long distance phone call.  I don't have 
numbers for this but think it was probably true up through the 1940s.

On 11/25/2016 6:15 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Nov 2016, Richard Knoppow wrote:
>
>>   My memory of telegrams is that the forms were a sort of tanish
>> yellow. Very old memory.
>>   While wire telegraph work is being discussed rather than radio the
>> "other" radio service, MacKay seems not to have been mentioned. MacKay
>> was associated with Postal Telegraph and later W.U.
>>
> There's a book "The Telegraph: a History of Morse's Invention and its
> Predecessors in the United States" by Lewis Coe.  I consider this a
> complement to "The Story of Telecommunications" by George Oslin.  Oslin
> writes from a Western Union standpoint - he was their P.R. man for many
> years - and Coe seems to be writing from a Postal viewpoint.  There
> are a lot of amusing stories in both books.  He tells of the elder
> Mackay who made a fortune in the Comstock Lode and married an opera
> singer there.  Pretty soon she decided Virginia City was too small for
> her and moved to Paris.  Mr. Mackay was running his business from New
> York and traveling to Paris to be with his wife.  In Paris he encountered
> a newspaper man, Bennett, who was there running his paper remotely by
> cablegrams.  Bennett was at odds with Jay Gould, who had control of
> Western Union and the cable business, so he suggested that Mackay should
> lay a cable to complete with Gould. Mackay did so, but then had trouble
> getting messages to and from his cables via W.U., so he started Postal
> Telegraph.  Jay Gould said Mackay was one man he could never beat because
> Mackay could at any time just dig up another million dollars in his silver
> mines.
>
> Of course that time was just about the peak for the telegraph business,
> which went downhill from then on.  The nation couldn't even support one
> telegraph company, let alone two.  Postal Telegraph came to be owned by
> ITT, and it was long felt by W.U. that ITT had a favored position with
> the U.S. government.  At first the government would not allow the two
> companies to merge, but in 1943 Postal was in suce dire straits that
> Congress brought about a shotgun wedding of the two.  W.U. was the
> surviving company but assumed some heavy burdens in the form of Postal's
> debt and employees and their pension obligations.  W.U. did get some
> good people out of the deal though, including engineer Gilbert Vernam
> and executive Walter Marshall, who became President of W.U.
>

-- 
Richard Knoppow
1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
WB6KBL