The Wire

How Money Learned to Travel at the Speed of Light The Money Stack — Episode 2 of 10 In 1871, Western Union noticed something peculiar about its own network. It had spent a decade stringing copper wire across an entire continent to carry words. But it also had offices in hundreds of towns, each holding cash, each staffed by an agent, each connected to every other by telegraph. At some point, somebody looked at that infrastructure and realised something quiet and revolutionary: they did not need to move money at all. You walked into a Western Union office in New York and handed over fifty dollars. The clerk tapped out a message in code. In San Francisco, another clerk read the message, verified a password, and counted fifty dollars out of a drawer that had been sitting there all along. No money crossed the country. Two ledgers were updated. The value arrived in minutes. That is still, in every essential respect, how it works today. Everything that followed — SWIFT,