Western Union

Western Union is an American financial services and communications company. It was founded in 1851 as The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company.

After a series of acquisitions of competing companies, the company changed its name to Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856 to signify the joining of telegraph lines from the west to the east coast. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock market index for the NYSE was created in 1884, Western Union was one of the original eleven companies tracked.

Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. It introduced the first stock ticker in 1866. Five years later in 1871 the company introduced its money transfer service. As the telephone replaced the telegraph, this would become its primary business. In 1923 Western Union introduced teletypewriters for joining its branches, and in 1958 offered the Telex to customer companies.

As the Internet became an arena for commerce at the turn of the millennium, Western Union started its BidPay service to let consumers pay for auction wins at sites like eBay; the service provided a way to pay with one's credit card and deliver the payment as a money order to the recipient. BidPay was renamed to Auction Payments in 2004, and is currently a competitor to online payment schemes like PayPal.

External links

• Western Union corporate website
• Company history 1851–2001