Western Union has taken of 451st position in the rating Fortune 500 in 2009, having moved from 473rd line in 2008. America was on the verge of civil war and needed a reliable connection between the North and South. On the telegraph market of the USA at this time were operated with six large companies: American Telegraph Company, New York Albany and Buffalo Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Company, Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph, Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Company, New Orleans & Ohio Telegraph Company, and the brainchild of Sibley & Co. - The Western Union Telegraph. In the 80's of Nineteenth century, Western Union was repeatedly tried capture by the railroad tycoon Jay Gould. He worked with Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first phone. Separation of the companies had two objectives: first, to give Western Union the opportunity to develop more intensively, and secondly, to help First Data to return to its original activity (in 1992 the company separated from the payment system of American Express as an independent financial services company). Money transfer is a matter of minutes, at any distance. In 1864, fearing the laying of long underwater lines, Western Union offered to carry out laying of telegraph lines to Europe through the Russian Alaska under the narrow Bering Strait and then to Siberia with branching in the major cities of Europe. In 1933, by the Western Union Company were invented "singing telegrams". Western Union incomes for 2007 have made $4,9 billion US dollars, and the quantity of transactions has made 572 million. In October 1871 the company Western Union began to provide money transfer services, drawing on its own extensive telegraph network. Sibley, the founder of Western Union, did not build a new telegraph lines, and persuaded the other players to join. American Telegraph Company, however, still had to buy it.