I’m watching all of Have Gun Will Travel from the beginning. I bought myself the boxed set a while back. I’m a Wild Thing.
Once we kids figured out that “Wire” wasn’t the man’s first name, it raised the question, how would that skimpy address get a message to him? Does someone in, say, Boston, go to the telegraph office and send a telegram to the (only?) office in San Francisco, and they have a directory that says “Paladin” is that cool dude who wears white suits (except when he wears black) and lives in the Hotel Carlton? So they print up the telegram and a guy on a bicycle delivers it?
How did one acquire a cable address? Was there a fee, like the monthly charge for a land line (and a listing in the Phone Book)? Are cable addresses still in use? Are they still needed in some places?
I do not have an answer, but I do recall the last time I heard such a conceit applied in a television show. There was an episode of Frasier in which Niles was going to move into a fancy condo or apartment building in Seatlle. His line was something like, “I won’t even have an address any more! Henceforth, I shall be ‘Doctor Niles Crane, The Montana.’”
I suspect that Paladin visits the cable office daily when he’s in town, and asks for any cables for him. Or possibly his hotel has a kid who stops by the cable office daily to get any cables for inhabitants of the hotel.
Are you kidding? Paladin never went to the cable office. Hey Boy (actually a Chinese man much above the age of a boy) gave the telegrams to him. And as I recall, he said they were delivered. I too have the boxed set, but it’s been some time since I watched.
I assume he was simply famous enough locally that only his names was a sufficient address inside San Francisco. Some time in 60’s a letter was delivered to Mad Magazine with no address other than a picture of Alfred E Neuman pasted on the envelope. There were no computer read addresses in those days, and even less so in Paladin’s time.
Very likely not, at least not in the developed world. Western Union ceased operating their telegram service in 2006. There is apparently a successor company, iTelegram, which offers telegram services, though this 2016 article from The Atlantic suggests that their service amounts to them sending a letter for you through normal mail. Their site talks up “your message is hand-delivered,” but they also say that they require a street address for delivery (and it sounds like “hand delivered” may well be just “the USPS delivery person puts it in the recipient’s mailbox”). So, no “cable address” like Paladin’s anymore.
This Wikipedia article also indicates that there are still telegram services offered in a number of other countries, but it’s not clear how many (if any) of them are still using the old technology for them.
I’m not an expert in this area, but I know that the telegraph companies went to great lengths to reduce the data a telegrapher would have to transmit, including using codes and abbreviations for many common phrases and questions. It would make a lot of sense to use a short descriptor for a recipient, instead of full name and address. Whether the local telegraph office kept a directory and delivered them or waited for somebody to call, I don’t know.
Yes. That’s a Telegraph Address. Which is something like a Phone Number. He’s a cool dude, so it probably goes to the telegraph in his swank hotel, and the page boy delivers it or gives it to his sidekick.
I see that 10 years ago government offices in India were still providing a “telegraph address”, although I’m sure that even then they meant what I would call a “telex address”
I remember reading - many years ago - that the Royal Mail staff enjoy getting addresses like that and they have a group of employees who handle addresses like that that stump lesser mortals. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
Well into the era of the ZIP Code, you saw a lot of addresses that made assumptions about how well known a particular company was, and it made perfect sense because large businesses had “holdout orders” at the local post office, and sent an employee each morning to get the box or bundle of mail. So “Westinghouse Electric, Pittsburgh, Pa.” was plenty to get it there, as was “George Brown, Rice Hotel, Houston, Tex.”
In the Telex era, companies had unique strings that worked very much like email addresses, and they typically told you the “answerback” that you would receive as verification that your message had gone through to the right place.
That makes me go out on a limb and think that companies and others having accounts with Western Union could “register” a name that would thereafter be considered perfectly sufficient as an address. A book at the Western Union office would have been kept up-to-date with the address or hotel where messages would be delivered, in case the new boy didn’t yet know.
Wikipedia knows all. You could register a telegraphic address with the Post Office or telegraph company. It suited them because it reduced the amount of data they had to transmit. It suited your correspondents because it cost them less to send the telegram. And it might suit you to have a distinctive and easily memorable telegraphic address.
The telegram was delivered in the usual way; nobody would have registered a telegraphic address if it meant that deliver would be delayed. The receiving telegraph office would consult a directory to find out where to deliver.
