The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is at Englewood, Colorado, and its international marketing and commercial services headquarters are in Montvale, New Jersey. Until it discontinued the service, this company was the best known US company in the business of exchanging telegrams.

Western Union has a number of divisions, with products such as person-to-person money transfer, money orders, and commercial services. As of September 9, 2008, the company has 350,000 Western Union agent locations in over 240 countries and territories. Reported revenues top $5 billion annually.

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 Hiram Sibley and Don Alonzo Watson 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 , to signify the joining of telegraph lines from coast to coast.

Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. In 1865 it formed the Russian American Telegraph in an attempt to link America to Europe, via Alaska, into Siberia, to Moscow.

The telegraph was dominated by Western Union, an industrialized monopoly. They were the first communications empire and the beginning of what was to come for the future of communications as it is known today.

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, based on its extensive telegraph network. In 1879, Western Union left the telephone business, having lost a patent lawsuit with Bell. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, money transfer would become its primary business.

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 became 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. It also handled 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.

Due to declining profits and mounting debts, Western Union slowly began to divest itself of telecommunications-based assets starting in the early 1980s. Due to deregulation at the time, Western Union began sending money outside the country, re-inventing itself as "The fastest way to send money worldwide^SM" and expanding its agent locations internationally.