Sometime on Friday, Jan. 27, Western Union, bowing to the ascendancy of modern technology like e-mail, sent its last telegram.

Western Union had its beginnings in 1851 in Rochester. Messages were transmitted by Morse code over wire, then hand-delivered by a courier. Ten years later, the company completed the first transcontinental telegraph line.

That drove the Pony Express, which had been operating for less than two years, out of business by offering customers delivery of a message across the country in less than a day (the average Pony Express delivery took 10 days). In the relatively recent era of e-mail and instant messaging, telegrams were usually delivered by overnight courier services.

A sampling of some of the last telegrams wired on the last day included birthday wishes and efforts by a few people, probably Western Union employees, to send the final message. The company had no information about the time of the very last message or the cities it bridged. At the height of business in 1929, more than 200 million telegrams were sent around the world. Just under 21,000 were sent last year.