Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.

And thus, with these two little sentences posted on the Western Union Web site, more than one hundred and fifty-five years of continuous information delivery service has come to and end.

Most of us paid little attention as the telegraph died a slow death over the last thirty years. We were too busy playing pong, experimenting with Casio digital watches, and ultimately hooking up to the World Wide Web to notice that the messaging service of our grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ generation was fading into obscurity.

From its revolutionary birth before the great War Between the States, to its heyday during the World War II generation, the Western Union telegram has been the method of choice to communicate short, meaningful thoughts to others on significant occasions. Telegrams were used to announce the first flight in 1903, the sinking of the Titanic, and the start of World War I. During the 1920s, it was cheaper to send a telegram than to place a long-distance call. Part of the nostalgia concerning the telegraph is associated with the innovative and concise nature of the message which relied on abbreviated phrases to reduce cost, including the word “stop” which replaced periods.

In the final analysis, the iconic message service that glamorized Hollywood in the 1930s and notified mothers and wives of the loss of loved ones during wartime (you can see a reenactment of one such delivery in the Vision Forum Film The League of Grateful Sons) ultimately succumbed to the utility of the highly efficient (though equally unromantic) e-mail as the electronic message of choice. Last year, in the twilight of its life, only twenty thousand Western Union telegrams were sent.

Once upon a time, the telegram was the usurper, displacing the heroic Pony Express. Now it is the telegram’s turn to disappear into the pages of history. As we bid goodbye forever to the brainchild of Samuel Morse and we continue to explore a new epoch in the history of human communications, we may once again ask the question that he raised to partner Alfred Vail in the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore on May 26, 1844:

“WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”