I once saw a telegram.
Back in the day, before my time, there was a company called Western Union and its delivery workers all across the country showed up at houses and delivered important messages.
“Telegram for Mr. Jones,” you’d hear on movies and cartoons made through, I guess, the mid-1940s. In the modern era, though, long-distance telephony pretty much wiped out the telegram. Western Union tried “Candygrams” and even a joint venture with the U.S. Postal Service called “Mailgram,” but it was no use.
So it was something when my friend John, who lived across the street from the house in Queens where I grew up from age 6 or so, showed me the telegram his mother received one night. It must have been in the early 1970s, and it was to inform her that her father in England had died.
Even then, the idea of sending or receiving a telegram was an anachronism. It was simply faster and easier to pick up the phone and dial (or, later, punch buttons) to tell someone important family news.
The reality is that communication technology is evolving and changing. Telegrams, once seen as evidence of an advanced technological society, today have no use, though if you go to the Web site at www.westernunion.com and click on “telegram,” you can send one. Still, why would you? Some might say more’s the pity, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Some forms of communication still have a lot of life left in them, despite earlier predictions of doom. Back in the early 1980s, when I went for my job orientation at the Postal Service, the legendary then-Postmaster General William F. Bolger appeared in a film and informed us that mail volume was predicted to fall, and fall dramatically, and that the Postal Service would soon have to cut tens of thousands of jobs. Just the news you want to hear at orientation for a job.
New technology has allegedly been the death knell of the post office for almost a century, and despite that it’s still around and doing the job pretty well. Electronic mail was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin, as private companies stole the overnight business and package business, and electronic greeting cards sent by e-mail would finish the job by eliminated another source of revenue. E-mail would also make “bulk business mail,” known to all as “junk mail,” obsolete.
True, mail volume has dropped, according to one friend who still works at the Postal Service, but it hasn’t disappeared. Indeed, as e-mail inboxes became flooded with spam advertising mortgages, prescription drugs and other things no one wanted, junk mail suddenly got a new life. What was once the disadvantage of junk mail – its high cost relative to e-mail – became an advantage because messages now had to be targeted to people most likely to respond.
The Postal Service’s past attempts as being a forward-looking communications technology company were not successful. In 1982, according to the Web site about.com, E-COM was started. It stood for Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, and it offered an electronic message service with hard copy delivery.
I remember seeing the clear plastic bags with a bundle of two or three letters coming through the mailstream. It was obviously not popular, though (I could see that from the paucity of pieces that moved into the system), and the service was terminated in 1985.
In fact, the Postal Service even tried to make e-mail illegal, but to no avail. You can’t fight the technology. Today, e-mail is ubiquitous but I still check my postal mailbox every day.
Many people carry cell phones, and some have even gone completely wireless, but a lot of folks still have their old landline phones, and have no plans to abandon them. I sure don’t. The two technologies exist side by side, and probably will for a long time to come.
The truth is that technologies old and new co-exist in our world. Maybe not always well, but they do nonetheless.
Vincent F. Safuto works for a newspaper in Florida, and occasionally turns up on his brother Robert’s podcasts.
