In 1860 the U.S. Congress arranged among the telegraph companies a competition to create a national line. The winner was Western Union. In 1995, First Financial Management was acquired by First Data Corp. (the deal amounted to $ 7 billion), and Western Union Financial Services became a subsidiary of First Data. Money transfer is a matter of minutes, at any distance. July 3, 1884 the company's shares were included in the calculation base for the newly created stock index Dow Jones Transportation Average. In 1914 Western Union engineers invented the first payment card - a prototype of the modern credit card. 1970 - a new service called In the summer of 1990 top managers of the Western Union Company spent day and night in the main office in Englewood (Colorado, USA). They needed to meet the challenge: to save the Western Union from bankruptcy, paying off the debts of the company millions of dollars. In 1884 Western Union has become a joint-stock company and was brought to the stock exchange. The company has entered in the first American stock index Dow Jones.