In the final betrayal of that old guy in peaked cap and glasses who always got shot in the first reel, before he could finish tapping out the vital message, AT&T Co is to pay $180m for ravaged Upper Saddle River, New Jersey-based Western Union Corp’s Business Services arm.Under the pact, AT&T will get the EasyLink electronic mail service to combine with its own AT&T Mail, as well as what’s left of the telex operations, and Western Union’s interests in electronic data interchange, voice-mail and facsimile services. The deal, which is subject to a whole string of approvals, leaves Western Union with its Mailgram business and its money transfer operations. The deal effectively marks the end of a 114-year war of attrition between the two companies. Western Union, already famed for the telegraph, which opened up the sparsely-populated parts of the North American continent, in 1876 let AT&T take on rights to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone invention for $100,000, believing it would never catch on, and later selling AT&T the Western Electric business, which grew to turn AT&T into the biggest manufacturer of telephone kit in the US.