Until WW II, there was a second telegraph company in the United States, known as Postal Telegraph. (They had nothing to do with the post office, just took the name to sound cool). They were a smaller outfit, but in competition with Western Union. Here is an ad (two pages)
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They ran into financial trouble and merged with Western Union.
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WU's well respected president, Walter P. Marshall, was originally a PT employee.
As an aside, there was another telephone company, Keystone Telephone, that competed directly with the Bell System in a few places.
They too fell onto hard times and were merged into the Bell System.
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