Email In the 18th Century

morphovar forwards a writeup in Low-tech Magazine recounting an almost-forgotten predecessor to email and packet-switched messaging: the optical telegraph. The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy. "More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an airplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers ... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same."

Comments

Spam?

[AlphaDrake]

Did spam make it across these networks as well?

"Having trouble with the smell of thine donkey? Only have the one mistress? Try friar pete's ol' fashioned elixer de skunke, it's new lead based formula works wonders like that Jesus guy over there"

Re:Spam?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Ah, yes, Claude Chappe's optical telegraph. :-) Nice that people still remember these. You can also read about them here. The part about the system cost compared to the electric telegraph is really interesting. It is not very suprising that this system was ultimately replaced soon after electrical telegraphs had become available. (One has to ask why Czech Post - providing virtually the same quality of service - has not yet seen the same fate? ;-))

Re:Spam?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

(Whoa, I clicked the wrong reply link? Just pretend the parent is a top-level post. ^_^ *blush*)

Re:Spam?

[Tablizer]

Did spam make it across these networks as well?

In an 18th-century British accent: "Oh bloody hell, I shall not need my wanker any bloody bigger! May the Queen assign lasting damnation upon your deplorable message."

Re:Spam?

[morgan_greywolf]

Indeed. A guy named Isaac Bayes would stand between two of the towers and every time he spotted a reference to making your penis larger, he would create a lot of thick black smoke so as to block the transmission between two towers.

And to this day, most spam filters are still called 'Bayesian filters.'

Re:Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: A wanker is the term for a person who masterbates. "A wanker wanks".

I live in fear that this may be marked informative.

Re:Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: It's spelled "masturbates", wanker.

Re:Spam?

[Tablizer]

Note: A wanker is the term for a person who masterbates. "A wanker wanks".

So my dick-tionary is wrong?

Re:Spam?

[ArAgost]

Well, I can assume that once you reach a certain proficiency, you can be called a MASTERbator.

Re:Spam?

[petermgreen]

Did spam make it across these networks as well?
I doubt it for simple economical reasons. Theese networks were probablly more expensive to use than the postal service and unsolicited bulk messages aren't really very urgent.

Re:Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

It couldn't be. SPAM wasn't invented until 1937. Back then, annoying messages were called "salted beef." This was the actual origin of "where is the beef?" expression.

Re:Spam?

[zhirole nift]

everybody masturbates. those who claim otherwise are 'wankers'.

Re:Spam?

[Bo'Bob'O]

Worst, insult, ever.

Re:Spam?

[AaxelB]

Ah, so what he meant to say was "wankee"?

As in, the wankee is wanked by the wanker.

Re:Spam?

[AKAImBatman]

It is not very suprising that this system was ultimately replaced soon after electrical telegraphs had become available.

Actually, it wasn't. The electrical telegraph had a very rocky start. Both France and Britain had optical telegraphs in place and were uninterested in investing in this new "electric" form of telegraph. Especially since those who worked on electric telegraphs were often untrained quacks.

It took a relatively new nation that lacked a telegraph (i.e. the United States) to cause the electric version to catch on. Even there, it took a while before the possibilities were really explored. Once it caught on, though, it caught on like wildfire. Didn't take long for an international telegraph to get setup, and for ticker-tape machines to appear.

For those interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book The Victorian Internet. It is well written, well researched, and tells a fascinating tale of the telegraph development that parallels the development of the Internet. On top of that, it sheds light on how the telegraph affected computer design and the communications protocols we use today. (e.g. ASCII is derived from the telegraph codeset called "Baudot Codes". Named for the inventor, Émile Baudot. He also has a measure of transmission speed named after him called "Baud". As in, a "300 Baud Modem". )

Re:Spam?

[zippthorne]

Not only that, but spoofed headers are a critical plot element in a classic work of fiction!

Re:Spam?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually, it wasn't. The electrical telegraph had a very rocky start. Both France and Britain had optical telegraphs in place and were uninterested in investing in this new "electric" form of telegraph. Especially since those who worked on electric telegraphs were often untrained quacks.

In the same way as the transistor had in the first years of its existence? The vacuum tubes' manufacturers certainly also didn't want to give up. Even though the technological progress was already accelerating in the beginning of the 19th century, it was still not quite that fast at the time. (Maybe it had also something to do with slow information dissemination? ;-)) Morse built his first lines sometime around 1845, and the French gave up on Chappe's semaphores in 1850s. For me, this timeframe is "quite soon" - especially when talking about the French. ;-) Maybe a bit of patriotism had also something to do with it. Now, I know about the works of von Sömmering, Schilling, Weber and others, but their constructions don't seem to be practical enough to be really useful - e.g., Schilling's initial eight-wire construction would be barely usable for long distance communication, and the early constructions IIRC didn't solve the problem of recording the transmission, which was clearly an advantage of Morse's invention. Oh, and thanks for the recommendation. I admit that I studied these things some ten years ago, my memory might have degraded a bit since that time.

Re:Spam?

[operagost]

I just learned two things about the 18th century:

- Misuse of apostrophes is not new
- Jesus was performing miracles much greater than the lame "appearing in toast and half-eaten fruit" tricks he does now.

Re:Spam?

[operagost]

And here I thought a masterbaiter was a skilled fisherman. You learn something new every day!

Re:Spam?

[game kid]

Issac Bayes ... a reference to making your penis larger

--and thus he lent his voice to the theme from Shaft.

(As we all know, the shame of being associated with male genitalia forced him to slightly change his last name and join the Church of Scientology.)

Re:Spam?

[Alioth]

Terry Pratchett did - his recent book "Going Postal", one of the main "characters" of the story is the clacks - the Discworld optical telegraph network. It's a fun book.

Re:Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

^_^ *blush*

Faggot.

Re:Spam?

[Chrisje]

Then try 'n' bend your head around the fact that a "Tosser" and a "Wanker" are the same thing.

Also, masturbation is with U. Masturbation without U isn't quite the same, now is it?

Re:Spam?

[tubegeek]

+1 for The Victorian Internet - a great read.

Re:Spam?

[tubegeek]

+1 for The Victorian Internet. A great read.

Re:Spam?

[Cally]

"Going Postal" finally convinced me that all the science and computer jokes around the Unseen University were, like a lot of the more subtle Douglas Adams humour, actually informed by a lot of detailed understanding of, well, science and computers. There's an underground hackers group who turn out to be the strange geeky kids who built and run the Clacks network. As a reference to the speed with which they can pass messages around, they call themselves "the Smoking Gnu". Coincidence? I think not.

Re:Spam?

[DavidTC]

Terry Pratchett was a nuclear engineer before he was a writer.

The clacks manages to be an analogy to telecom buyouts and mergers and the early IT industry and the OSS community fighting the monopoly provider, and he even gets a few cell phone jokes in here. (People walking around with semaphores and messaging while they're walking, running into other people and annoying the heck out of everyone.)

And, just like instant communications revolutionized trade and politics in the real world, the clacks are doing the same on Discworld.

Re:Spam?

[Reaperducer]

those who worked on electric telegraphs were often untrained quacks.

Ye olde Microsofte?

Re:Spam?

[Adambomb]

And someone finally gets the reference in The Color of Magic from the scene in the airplane.

Damnit, I never knew that =)

Re:Spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because penis enlargement pills hadn't been invented yet.

Light the Fires

[coaxial]

Gondor needs help.

Re:Light the Fires

[calebt3]

Apparently this is slightly more sophisticated than a simple "HELP!".

Re:Light the Fires

[hyperm0g]

And Rohan will answer! Muster the Rohirrim! Assemble the Men at Dunharrow, as many Men as can be found. You have two days. On the third, we ride for Gondor... and war.

Re:Light the Fires

[Anonymous Coward]

>Gondor needs help.

Yes, apparently they can't spell "beacons" - Someone assist them, for goodness' sake!

"beacansofgondor"?!? Puhleeze...

Re:Light the Fires

[Anonymous Coward]

It was your classic hobbit in the middle attack.

Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Kadin2048]

I was reading something recently that discussed the US Postal Service in the late 19th century. In some major cities, like New York and Boston, the mail used to come as much as five times a day. That meant you could write to someone (local, served from the same Post Office) in the early morning, have it picked up in the first round, delivered in the second, have their reply picked up in the third, and delivered on the fourth. (And you could even send a reply back in the final pickup for delivery the next morning.) That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!

If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[timeOday]

Where I work they just cut the internal mail service from 10 to 4 times per week, due to lack of demand. Can't say I've noticed!

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[iocat]

I remember reading an article a few years ago, on various companies' ettiquette for the term "email." Some caled it 'email,' some called it 'electronic mail,' some called it by a quaint brand name ('QuickMail', anyone?). The article noted that at Micorosoft, it was simply refered to as "mail." So the author asked the inevitable question: "What do you call something that comes in a physical envelope?" The answer? "FedEx."

Anyway, there is a good book called The Victorian Internet that, despite its suspect name, is extremely well written and goes into great and fascinating depth on the telegraph (optical and electronic), as well as the pro-tech savvy of the Victorian age. I'm too lazy to put in a link for you, but I assure you, the google or the amazon can give you all the details.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[FooAtWFU]

New York also used to have a crazy pneumatic tube system that took mail from one part of the island to another. They shut it down after the invention of the Automobile. I suspect the advent of that, along with refinements in sorting, let them deliver more mail with fewer mailmen (with the side effect of it being less often). Considering that Labor these days is a lot more expensive than it used to be, that has to be a huge cost savings overall. That's probably better for most people's mail usage than five-times-a-day service.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Tablizer]

New York also used to have a crazy pneumatic tube system that took mail from one part of the island to another. They shut it down after the invention of the Automobile.

I bet they wanted it back after the traffic got congested.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Colin Smith]

In some major cities, like New York and Boston, the mail used to come as much as five times a day. The Banks.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[seadd]

True, but this was in times before the telephone. In that time, a proper lady would get up in the morning and write a card inviting her friends for an evening cup of tea and gossip, they would get the card by noon, reply by 3pm they would be there, and by 7pm tea and biscuits would be ready.
Today, there is no need for such service - personally my mailman delivers only bills and parcels, while gossip arrangements are made using sms or email:)

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that the mail men want to live a much more lavish life than they did 100 years ago. Even though nothing about their jobs has changed.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[petermgreen]

That's pretty good -- some people I know don't even check their email that often!
Presumablly they did it because thier was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it and there was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it because other means of communication were too expensive to be common.

If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
Yes because it doesn't make sense to do mass rounds for a service only a few people require.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

> the mail used to come as much as five times a day.

I'd like to come five times a day.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[c6gunner]

It's not just the mailmen, it's people in general. That's why all these complaints about "the increasing gap between the rich and the poor" are such nonsense - you have only to look at the standard of living for people doing the most menial trades in order to realize that "the poor" have a better lifestyle today than they have at any other time in history.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Lehk228]

by all means offer to pay some couriers 5.15 and hour and see where the market takes you

protip: a massive truck of fail is in your future.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Planesdragon]

"the poor" have a better lifestyle today than they have at any other time in history. only if you measure access to luxury goods. If you instead measure access and retention of wealth -- the poor today have more crap than they used to. In most places they're not even guaranteed a place to live if they keep doing their menial job.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you mail it across town and they get it three weeks later if they get it at all.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[ThePromenader]

Paris had one of those pneumatic systems - that ran until the late 1980's. Much of the system is still intact (save the portals), and can still be accessed through the city's underground network of abandoned mines... possible re-utilisation? Could be practical for sending your animal to the cat-sitter...

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[AlecC]

London used to have a system of hydraulic power distribution to power lifts (elevators) in the business areas. When it finally closed down, the network of pipes was in exactly those areas, full of high profile financial companies, in which they wanted to fit fibre optic cables, so they were recycled almost immediately.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[Tom]

Same thing over here in Europe. My grandparents still remembered times when mail would come three times a day.

But, it's been a long time since public services were seen as a service to the public and the goal should be the best possible service. Today the goal is profit for the shareholders, and the general public is a tiny minority shareholder, if at all.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[coaxial]

Now in all fairness to the post office, mail volume has dramatically increased in the 150-200 years since.

London also had multiple mail deliveries in the 19th century. I think pretty much every major city had at least 5 deliveries. London I think had like 9 deliveries at one point. It seems like in Ada Lovelace's papers there are copies of letters that where she carried out conversations over the course of the day via the mail. Not unlike email threads today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too.

[c6gunner]

As opposed to all those times in history when everyone was guaranteed housing? :)

Ah, Clacks

[The Grey Ghost]

Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks

Re:Ah, Clacks

[Anonymous Coward]

No worries. Antibiotics will clear that right up.

Re:Ah, Clacks

[DynaSoar]

> Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks

But due to quantum (those pesky quantums get into everything) there are particles of ideas zipping around the multiverse(s?) just waiting for a properly receptive mind to collide with, transferring the thought into it from Some Place Else. It is therefore likely that PTerry got zapped by more than one such idea quantums (quite possibly a virtual cosmic shower of them) from The Disc, in this case one emitted from the mind of Robert Dearheart.*

The High Energy Magic division of U.U. is currently hard at work researching a way to make peoples' minds less resistant to idea quantums. Unfortunately, being based on magic rather than technology (as is the Clacks), it is unlikely this will ever work on minds on our planet, where it's needed far more than on the Disc.

* The same probably happened to Robert Hooke. The ass toot reader should examine the history, especially the year of Hooke's presentation to the Royal Society, and see that "17th century" is in fact accurate. Hooke didn't have it built, but he was the first (on this planet) to present the concept.

Re:Ah, Clacks

[DynaSoar]

The wife reminds me that quantums, being able to traverse the multiverse(s?) must therefore be able to travel any direction in time. Therefore Robert Hooke may have gotten the idea from Pratchett. Given that more people have read Discworld books than have read Hooke's works, and that any of them may emit idea quantums, she is most likely correct.

Re:Ah, Clacks

[Evil.Bonsai]

I guess I could've looked it up, but I had thought Terry made this up. I should've known better, as much as I read his stuff.

Re:Ah, Clacks

[bockman]

The High Energy Magic division of U.U. is currently hard at work researching a way to make peoples' minds less resistant to idea quantums. Unfortunately, being based on magic rather than technology (as is the Clacks), it is unlikely this will ever work on minds on our planet, where it's needed far more than on the Disc.

Maybe our world would benefit more of an "idea quantums filter", since I see plenty of bad ideas implemented - or attemped to.

but

[Sobieski]

If it was "wireless and without need for electricity", then it was not electronic mail

Re:but

[mikesd81]

eh, wireless maybe, but definitely need electricity, you're right.

Re:but

[monkeySauce]

So then it must have been O-mail.

You know what I'm talking about... Oh! - Oh! - Oh!...

Re:but

[fbjon]

This was enterprise mail, hence not available to the plebes.

Re:but

[operagost]

It's not nearly enterprisey enough. Where's the AJAX?

Re:but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I've tagged this with "omail"

Come get your Big O's here.

Clacks

[Anonymous Coward]

Terry Pratchett calls these the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks]Clacks[/url].

Re:omfg

[mdenham]

Talk about a shit job. How many of them jumped out of the towers to their own death out of sheer boredom? Not nearly as many as probably made amusing edits to messages on occasion.

"S... E... N... D... send, F... A... R... C... E... S... farces?!"

Clacks!

[orkysoft]

Those are the clacks! Did they have c-commerce back then, too? And clacksites?

Re:Clacks!

[orkysoft]

Thanks for modding me redundant, but when I posted, I those other Clacks posts were not visible. If they were, I would have figured out all by myself that my post would be redundant.

Re:Clacks!

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, and they even had clownloading, while porno was transmitted via Clit Torrent!

Re:Clacks!

[orkysoft]

I bet they also had advertisements by DoubleClack!

Re:Clacks!

[Antique Geekmeister]

Remember, it's called "c-mail". And obviously they used Leonard of Quirm to make the transmissions "fiendishly" difficult to decode. Now if we could only find some competent "Sammies" to go shut down the fake, inserted ads by Dibbler for the House of Harga ribs, we could read our c-mail in peace.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the book is called "Going Postal", and Terry Pratchett really captures the flavor of we geeks who do our work because we love doing it, and how the rest of the world deals with us.

"Minor" mistake but...

[RobertM1968]

"provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy"

The "early 1800's" is the 19th Century - not 18th.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Tablizer]

The "early 1800's" is the 19th Century - not 18th.

Whoever came up with that convention gets in "F" in communication, documentation, and interface design. They should be sentenced to debugging off-by-one loop index errors for the rest of eternity. I wonder if he/she is related to the guy who started C array indexing at zero[1] ;-)

[1] I've read they did it for efficiency because internally it multiplies the index to get the starting offset in an array of equal-sized elements. If you start at one, then indexing requires a subtraction, or else waste an element, which may have mattered in the 60's when RAM cost an arm and a leg.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[A nonymous Coward]

It's basic arithmetic. I'm sure the math wizards will correct my terminology. but there's nothing complicated about it other than there being no year 0 because the zero hadn't been invented yet.

The first century began at 1 and ended, duh, at 100. The second century began at, duh, 101, and ended at, duh, 200.

The fact that You can't keep track of such simplicity is no reason to blame somebody else for your ineptness.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Tablizer]

The fact that You can't keep track of such simplicity is no reason to blame somebody else for your ineptness.

The fact that it tripped up another slashdotter is evidence that it is a common tripper. It's just best to avoid such terminology if it has a history of being misinterpreted. Make the terms fit humans, not the other way around. And, a perfectly good alternative is "In the 1700's" (seventeen-hundreds).

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[hpa]

[1] I've read they did it for efficiency because internally it multiplies the index to get the starting offset in an array of equal-sized elements. If you start at one, then indexing requires a subtraction, or else waste an element, which may have mattered in the 60's when RAM cost an arm and a leg.

The compiler is more than capable of doing this transformation. The real reason is because the vast majority of algorithms are easier to describe with the first index as zero -- this was a lesson learned from FORTRAN, which started indexing at 1.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Dakkus]

They could call the 1800s "century 18". Or perhaps "culture 18", whatever each one finds the best version.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Waffle Iron]

I wonder if he/she is related to the guy who started C array indexing at zero[1] ;-)

I doubt they were related, because if they *had* started indexing centuries at zero like C (which is the One Correct Way to index anything) then we wouldn't have this stupid century/year dissonance..

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wasting your time. There's people out there who still thinks last century ended on 12-31-1999.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[osu-neko]

Interestingly enough, most mothers have no problems understanding that the first year of their child's life *ends* on its first birthday, that its one year old during the second year of its life, two years old during the third year of its life, etc. But then, most mothers are smarter than most /.ers... :p

People who can't keep which century it is straight are people who basically just can't count. I don't think anyone should get an "F" in communication for assuming their listener can count.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[cammoblammo]

You're wasting your time. There's people out there who still thinks last century ended on 12-31-1999.

Well, if they have 31 months in the year I think they can end their centuries whenever they want!

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

yes but if they started with year zero, well, then, what would Trent Reznor have done for a provocative album title?

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Foobar of Borg]

yes but if they started with year zero, well, then, what would Trent Reznor have done for a provocative album title?

*ahem*

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as a follow-up to your post, I made the initial mistake of assuming the compiler wouldn't be able to do this with variable indexing. However, then I realized the compiler would simply translate it as (arr-1) + i * sizeof element.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[El_Oscuro]

And of course, the One Correct Way to represent hex numbers is with upper case letters, and the One Correct Editor is VI.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[operagost]

You shouldn't use an apostrophe with plural nouns ("1700s"). It's just best to avoid such terminology if it has a history of being misinterpreted. Make the terms fit humans, not the other way around. A perfectly good alternative is "the 18th century."

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

due to the reworking of centuries if it began January 1 1800 and ended December 31 1899 it was the 18th century.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Hognoxious]

that its one year old during the second year of its life

I have a mental block about working out how old I am - I can never rememeber if you subtract the years and add one if you've had your birthday or subtract one if you haven't. I have to work it out from first principles using what you said as a basis.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1800s is the period of time between 1800 and 1809.

The 19th century is the period of time between 1801 and 1900.

The sooner people stop misusing "1800s" to refer to the period of time between 1800 and 1899, the better.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if he/she is related to the guy who started C array indexing at zero[1] Wait, what? How do I know what you're saying about indexing without knowing the value stored at index 1 of this 'zero' array that you refer to?

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[nutshell42]

And, a perfectly good alternative is "In the 1700's" (seventeen-hundreds).

That's inconsistent with the 1710s, the 1720s, ... and the 1790s. Why should you use an expression that's got a different meaning (1700-1709) to describe something that has a perfectly fine word of its own (18th century) just because the American population is too stupid to A) count to 18 or B) remember one simple fact (there's no 0th century, it doesn't really make sense either), which is a lot more logical than half the English language anyway. (And even better, I'm sure most Americans could care less. So the majority of Americans thinks there's less important stuff out there =)

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Dakkus]

Well.. In this case I used that yo avoid saying "19th century", which would have been weirdish. And I don't think saying 1800s meaning the 19th century will ever end, because in so so many languages it would directy translate about this way: "the 1800-time" or "18-hundred-time". That system, BTW, has the funny effect that it's practically impossible speaking of the first ten years of that century. This happens for example with Finnish, in which it's currently impossible even talking of the first /century/ without using some weird bypasses in your speak, such as "during the first decade of the 2000-time". Take any subject, you can find languages that handle such subject very stupidly. For example the Russian language almost never uses their word for "be", which causes some funny situations while talking in Russian. Can't remember an example from English, but I can remember I've ran into some of them during my life.

Re:"Minor" mistake but...

[Anonymous Coward]

im well aware of the actual source of the album title. kudos for not playing nice with my silly jibe.

did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Big Torque]

I think China also had a simialer thing with the great wall. Dose anyone know more about this.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[AlphaDrake]

Link

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[timeOday]

Don't know about china, but I do seem to remember this technique from a "Lord of the Rings" movie :) They were lighting fires atop towers rather than any complex signaling though.

And I guess Native Americans' smoke signals would count also.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I think China also had a simialer thing with the great wall. Dose anyone know more about this.

I know that "simialer" isn't a word, and that "dose" doesn't work in the context in which you use it.

I doubt that helps, but thought I'd point it out.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Teancum]

One nice thing about the "lighting the fires atop the walls" would do is not only notify that an attack is happening, but also the direction it is coming from.

The Internet Brain talks a little about this a little bit, including some potential references to look at.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

I also recall being taught about the Chinese fires in history class a long time ago so I think it's probably likely it's correct. No idea which dynasty or period it was in though. The Romans were playing this trick 2 millennia ago. An attack on Hadrians Wall could be notified by signal fire to Rome in less than 48 hours - half the length of Europe and crossing the Alps in the process. ISTR from school history (so it may be wrong....) that from the Wall to London via Eboracum it was only something like six beacons were needed and about 30 minutes. Trouble was it would take a month to march the army up there.... As well as this, the attack by the Spanish Armada in 1588 was signalled by beacons and at the 400th anniversiary these were reused and the warning message sent up the country again.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Gordonjcp]

In Scotland, a lot of hills had "brochs" or forts on top. To signal an impending attack, they would light huge fires beside them, with the signal chain going from hill to hill. This was in the early Iron Age.

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it was called "Chinese Whispers". Basically the guys in the towers on the wall would shout the message to each other and pass it on. Due to a lack of error corrwection and varying dialects over wall so big, often a warning that the "Ruskies are coming" could be mis-weceived as "Plawn cuwwy and 2 flied lice".

Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?

[rapiddescent]

The roman signal stations are still on the Ordnance Survey maps in Perthshire with signal stations some 1km to 3 km apart on hill tops. This link shows a signal station proximity to a camp with a much bigger fort to the west. infact, this area of Scotland is littered with roman remains because they had to exit in a big hurry regularly as the Scots kicked italian ass on a regular basis.

they also had signal stations on the Antonine Wall which was some 100km north of the famous Hadrians Wall.

So this is very much email in the 122AD to 250AD century - although, it didn't help the romans much. they had too much physical infrastructure that was a big disadvantage in the guerrilla tactics of the Scots and thus were not flexible enough to change. There are lots of parallels with the US tactics in Iraq and one wanders whether the tacticians have been researching their roman history well enough before deploying assets in the middle east.

Semaphores and smoke signals are ancient

[davidwr]

Native American smoke signals date back to pre-Columbian times.

Torches and and other forms of optical telegraphy date back to ancient times.

Thanks to the seminal work of J. Hofmueller and his colleagues, modern flag semaphores can also be used to encapsulate IP datagrams. Presumably, this is more efficient than delivering the same traffic by animal transport but less efficient than by wire or radio.

Re:Semaphores and smoke signals are ancient

[Anonymous Coward]

a history of communication touches on Native smoke signals and mentions they date back to pre-columbian times

Re:Semaphores and smoke signals are ancient

[Anonymous Coward]

More efficient than animal transport? Latency wise, but not throughput...

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a donkey full of scrolls hurtling down the cobblestones :-P

Re:Semaphores and smoke signals are ancient

[kypper]

Ahh yes, but can it do Wuthering Heights?

Telegraph Hill in San Francisco

[ortcutt]

Telegraph Hill in San Francisco was at one time the site of an optical telegraph. Hence the name.

The hill owes its current name to a semaphore, a windmill-like structure erected in September 1849, for the purpose of signaling to the rest of the city the nature of the ships entering the Golden Gate. Atop the newly-built house, the marine telegraph consisted of a pole with two raisable arms that could form various configurations, each corresponding a specific meaning: steamer, sailing boat, etc. The information was used by observers operating for financiers, merchants, wholesalers and speculators. As some of these information consumers would know the nature of the cargo carried by the ship they could quickly predict the upcoming (generally lower) local prices for those goods and commodities carried. Those who did not have advance information on the cargo might pay a too-high price from a merchant unloading his stock of a commodity -- a price that was about to drop. On October 18, 1850, the ship Oregon signaled to the hill as it was entering the Golden Gate the news of California's recently acquired statehood.

Telegraph Hill

Re:Telegraph Hill in San Francisco

[MichaelSmith]

Flagstaff hill in Melbourne was used to watch for ships approaching the harbour. A flag would be raised to relay the observation of an incoming ship. Not quite as handy as a proper telegraph but one bit communication served the purpose.

patent trolls

[yabba-dabba-do]

In other news, NTP is now looking for someone to sue over this infringing technology.

The Victorian Internet

[blamanj]

Tom Standage's book covered this quite well.

Re:The Victorian Internet

[mikelieman]

Strangely enough, so does Terry Pratchett...

Re:The Victorian Internet

[giminy]

Was just going to say the same thing. I read it only a week ago. I highly recommend anyone who has said, "The Internet will bring about world peace/usher in a new age of global understanding/etc" to give it a read.

i have a great comment

[circletimessquare]

please watch this space for 3 hours in order to view it

my comment is currently being transmitted from schenectady to poughkeepsie and the bad weather is interfereing with the candles staying lit

Re:i have a great comment

[Anonymous Coward]

NO CARRIER

Re:i have a great comment

[JustOK]

Sorry. Had to reboot one of the routers. The router will be back up in 3 hours. Had to get the new boots in town. Size 11.

Common in Italy in the middle agaes

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole cost of Southern Italy is full of towers that were used a light based communication/alarm system, especially against the raids of the so called saracens (people from the Islamic nation from the south) in the middle ages. I believe that a similar system was also used in Roman and possibly Greek times. The distance between the towers is also similar, 5-20Km.

So...

[Rip Dick]

Was the Optical Telegraph networked described by the clueless politicians of the time as a "series of flags"?

Re:So...

[hazem]

Well, it's certainly not like a bunch of oxen carts.

Re:So...

[bigstrat2003]

Nah, it would still be a "series of tubes", since one could say that, in a sense, telescopes are tubes. ;)

Re:omfg

[calebt3]

That would depend upon how often messages were sent. A signal like the fire beacons in LOTR would be a pain to be in charge of because you don't do anything most of the time, but you still have to be alert when the message finally has to be sent.

Wow!

[sunspot42]

Looks like the Victorians could copy and transmit data faster than Windows Vista!

Re:omfg

[MrCreosote]

"99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer stark terror"

Sempahore towers

[Uomograsso]

There is a reconstructed tower at Chatley Heath near Guildford, England, which was part of the route from the admiralty in London down to Portsmouth.

There are still some left in Barbados:

http://photo.clifford.ac/2007/Barbados.October/tn/dscn2211.jpg.index.html

and here is what you see when looking at Cotton Tower from Grendade Hall:
http://photo.clifford.ac/2004/Barbados.April/tn/p4130674.jpg.index.html

--
Alan clifford

Re:Sempahore towers

[owlstead]

This one is better, in my opinion, it displays the stone clac^H^H^H^Hsemaphore tower and the wooden part on top structure to relay the messages.

Napoleon used these...

[The Breeze]

Anyone familiar with the Patrick O'Brian novels featuring Jack Aubrey or the C.S. Forester novels featuring Horatio Hornblower will recognize these...

18th?

[nurb432]

American Indians did this long before that with smoke signals with people on top of hills.

Theory goes that long before that the ancient pagans of Europe did a similar thing near stonehenge.

Progress

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It just shows that "progress" is not linear. Service in particular has declined. In the past service was limited by technology. Now that technology has caught up, service is limited by cost cutting etc. Or put another way, no longer are these organisations motivated to provide the best service they can, but are rather motivated to be as crap as they can and still get away with it. This is not limited to postal services either.

Re:Progress

[QuantumG]

Or, ya know, the demand for hand delivered mail has gone down.

Re:Progress

[petermgreen]

Any company who wants to survive will only provide services they can make a profit on.

If you want something delivered in a hurry you can still get that service but you will have to pay a lot for it because the demand is sufficiantly low that someone will have to make a special journey. The reason the demand is low is because the phone network provides similar services at higher speed and lower cost for messages and there aren't that many people sending packages that are that urgent.

That is progress, high frequency mail delivery (very labour intensive and still not very fast) replaced by telephones, telexes and later fax machines and email.

Re:Progress

[c6gunner]

With such a poor understanding of economics, it's surprising you were ever able to afford a computer!

Re:Progress

[Antique Geekmeister]

And been cluttered by junk mail. Now, if they could schedule the actual mail for hte first delivery, and the junk mail for the second through fourthh delliveries, then it might come back to being useful that way.

Re:Progress

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too drunk to figure out what he meant... but I assume by your comment that he was also drunk.

Probably and

[iknownuttin]

their intelligence agencies spied on network traffic by tapping in at local hill tops with binoculars.

Would the equivalent of a root kit be some guy with a flint-lock taking over a station?

Re:Probably and

[calebt3]

No flintlock required. He would simply need a keg of beer.

RTFA!

[zebslash]

If you take the time to read the article, you will see the technology was invented and developed in France in 1791. But I forgot, this is Slashdot.

Re:RTFA!

[calebt3]

1791 is late 18th century.

Re:RTFA!

[zebslash]

And ? Does that make the title of the article wrong ?

Re:RTFA!

[SnoopJeDi]

RTFA is an answer to people who don't read the articles, and get all their information from the summary.

Not an excuse for poorly written summaries that obfuscate the true message of the article.

Re:RTFA!

[calebt3]

The disputed text is in the summary.

Re:RTFA!

[zebslash]

Where is the obfuscation ? Read again: "The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s.": 1) The article maps out some of the European networks (presumably 18th century, as inferred from the title) 2) but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s: ok, such kind of technology appeared later in the US, and the article does not detail any example of them. Is that so difficult to understand ?

Re:RTFA!

[zebslash]

Read again the summary, it does not say the technology was invented in the US in the 1800s. It is not very complicated.

Re:RTFA!

[Myopic]

zebstash is right. calebt3 is wrong.

but, the title and the summary are somewhat confusingly stated.

Re:RTFA!

[Anonymous Coward]

But I forgot, this is Slashdot.

But you forgot?? You've been here for like, what, a week? a week and a half?? Did you read the 10th Anniversary coverage and now consider yourself an old timer or something? I'll bet you hand out a bunch of "YMBNH" quotes, too.

Wow even back then

[Anonymous Coward]

people couldn't tell ITS from IT'S?

They're in an old movie too

[belmolis]

I remember first seeing these in an old movie, which I remember as being in black-and-white. It may have been an old version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Re:They're in an old movie too

[freedom_india]

During The age of Count of Monte Cristo novel, it was shown to work.
Only thing that affected it was Fog, Mist, Rain.
Probably reinventing the wheel i guess.

Re:They're in an old movie too

[commodoresloat]

I remember first seeing these in an old movie, which I remember as being in black-and-white. So black was 0 and white was 1?

Sorry, but...

[djupedal]

The Great Wall in China put similar means to use hundreds of years earlier.

Colored flags, whistling arrows, fires & hand signals all worked as part of a communication chain that spanned greater distances as well (6,400 km).

And 'man-in-the-middle' attacks were usually over before they began :)

Re:Sorry, but...

[Tablizer]

The Great Wall in China put similar means to use hundreds of years earlier.

But did they use telescopes? If not, then it would require more stations. IIRC, there's a tower every mile or so. I imagine (walking) chains of signalers were a common battle coordination technique for thousands of years.

Re:Sorry, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Great Wall in China put similar means to use hundreds of years earlier.

Sorry, but that's only similar in the sense that an etch-a-sketch is similar to an LCD monitor.

Colored flags, whistling arrows, fires & hand signals all worked as part of a communication chain

A fire is a 1-bit communication system -- it's lit or not lit. It can convey only one unique message. A whistling arrow has similarly insignificant capabilities -- you might be able to send maybe three or four unique messages by varying the pitch, and possibly even up to a dozen or so by firing different numbers of arrows, but it's really only going to work for transmitting predetermined messages. I suspect the flags and hand signals were similarly unsophisticated, because Chinese had a crippling disadvantage, namely the lack of any phonetic writing system making it unfeasible to encode text for transmission before the development of the Chinese telegraphic code (which encodes Chinese characters as four-digit numbers, and wasn't invented until after the electric telegraph).

These European semaphore networks were able to convey arbitrary information in natural human language. Totally different, many orders of magnitude more sophisticated. It's comparable to the difference between animal noises and human speech: your dog can bark when it's angry and yelp when it's in pain, but it can't tell you why it's angry or in pain.

Read The Victorian Internet

[RoloDMonkey]

For more detail, read The Victorian Internet. It is an awesome book.

Fax History

[Tablizer]

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but its interesting how long the fax machine has been around. From wikipedia:

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain is often credited with the first fax patent in 1843. He used his knowledge of electric clock pendulums to produce a back-and-forth line-by-line scanning mechanism.

Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated the device at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.

In 1861, the first fax machine, Pantelegraph, was sold by Giovanni Caselli, even before the invention of workable telephones.

Signal guns

[flyingfsck]

And before that, since about 1500 AD, signal guns were commonly used. The bit rate was rather low, but by using bespoke messages, a signal could be sent across a country at the speed of sound.

taggers are fucking illiterate

[toby]

BEACONS of Gondor, for Sauron's sake.

BEACONS.

If you can't afford a dictionary, rednecks, at least Google.

Re:taggers are fucking illiterate

[halcyon1234]

Mmmm, bacons of Gondor. Sizzling fatty meats of Frodo!

Re:taggers are fucking illiterate

[Anonymous Coward]

Frodo IS a fatty meat, you insensitive clod.

Semaphores weren't the first

[Jesus_666]

Actually, the semaphore-based network wasn't the first on in Europe. Before it, there was a simpler network based around mutexes, but it wasn't very popular because it got quite bothersome once you had more than two people communicating. Still it was a major step forward from the previous concurrent networks where the non-locked shared message space meant that if two people broadcasted at the same time they'd overwrite each other's messages.

Much later, North America would see an experimental monitor-based optical messaging network, but the cost of keeping hundreds of big CRTs powered on all the time quickly put an end to it.

Re:Semaphores weren't the first

[Watson Ladd]

Later Reppy implemented a rendezvous based messaging system, but only the French really understood it.

Re:KMFA!!! (RTFA)!

[RobertM1968]

It's a slow news day... perhaps you are trying to say that whoever approved the summary on /. should have read the article so they would have gotten the summary correct?

My problem isn't an inability to read the article... whoever wrote the title and summary seem to have had that problem.

Re:The Count of Monte Cristo

[tolworthy]

It's not just the movie. These message towers play a key part in the novel. The Count ruins one of his enemies, a banker, by sending a false message about a foreign war.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

It only takes like five minutes to get a message from Gondor to Rohan with signal fires!

Re:KMFA!!! (RTFA)!

[zebslash]

Once again: the summary IS correct!!!!! The technology was invented in the 18th century, prior its introduction in the US in the 1800s, but does not discuss the latter. Is that so difficult to grab?

Re:omfg

[mfnickster]

The system didn't correct for transmission errors very well...

The first message came through as: "Opus caught rickets from bats!"

At my old job

[Anonymous Coward]

They out-source email and internal email delivery time went from seconds to hours.

Re:The Count of Monte Cristo

[belmolis]

Yes, that's it then. I knew it was in the book, which I read as an adult, but wasn't sure what movie that was as I saw it so long ago.

"Virus"

[Tablizer]

network consisted of a chain of towers... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher [worker], looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain...

Back then when a "node was infected with a virus", it was literal.

The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Hubec]

Before the semaphore telegraph a man could travel faster than information. Am I the only one who thinks that's just really cool? The whole concept of being able to race across the globe faster than events is completely alien to our current existence.

Hmmm... Let me put it this way; Before the semaphore telegraph, the world was split into a very large number of simultaneous but completely separate realities. As soon as that telegraph came into existence those realities began merging into one.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[True Vox]

You hurt my brain..... but I approve.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Anonymous Coward]

...and even once the submarine telegraph was available, there was (in the case of isolated countries) often only one telegraph link -- so when the line went down, you had absolutely NO idea whether it was due to (a) a technical malfunction or (b) a sudden outbreak of hostilities.

At one stage, the Australian colonies' only connection to Britain was through a single telegraph cable that came ashore at Darwin and then ran straight through some of the inhospitable country on earth (well, except Antarctica).

Suddenly the telegrams stopped coming. Wild speculation in the press. Was it war with Russia, Germany or France? Finally, the truth came out: the line was down, but the colonial governments didn't know that for weeks.

B

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[tqft]

Really awesomely cool actually.

Have toyed with the idea writing a story on this.

Get in your ship from techno-ish city (London) and set sail for the Indies. Funny how when you get there everything is not quite what you might expect - think many worlds interpretaion co-existing. As the information flow speeds up - the realities converge - to what though?

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[risk one]

Much like light cones in physics. Very cool indeed. Not strictly true, though. There have been smoke signals, drums and similar communication methods since the dawn of man. You need to go a lot further back to find a time when the speed of communication limited the homogeneity of cultures. And if you go that far back, the distances between tribes and lack of general communication is the source of the separation, rather than the actual speed of communication.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Repossessed]

Not really true, yes, man could travel faster than information for short distances, but setups like the pony express and the Aztec runner network (a network of sprinters, who would run a mile or so, then hand the message off to the next runner and rest) .meant that over large distances, information would overtake an individual. And that's discounting more advanced technologies like smoke signals and carrier pigeons.

Semaphore towers were probably a lot cheaper though.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[nfk]

Your awe is understandable, but it is slightly misplaced. Semaphore telegraphs were not the first instance of communication faster than human travel. There were drums, smoke, etc. In the Chinese Great Wall, for instance, they were able to transmit messages over more than 500 km within a few hours, according to a web site.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[complete loony]

Certainly the latency was lower, but the bandwidth sucked. Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a state coach full of parchment.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[JoshJ]

Historical footnote: there was a battle fought in Louisiana after the peace treaty was signed. There were likely many others, but that's the only one I can think of offhand.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Antique Geekmeister]

Oh, it still is separated. Those realities have just gotten a bit more closely linked. Welcome to quantum physics!

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[crossmr]

While there may have been earlier faster modes of communication, the real point is, was this the first one that really caught on?
Its not usually the first one, but the popular one that really changes the world.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Lennie]

I still do, when I send an e-mail to a colleague at work that had Outlook 2000+ instead of Outlook 2000 I'm usually faster. It probably takes about half to a whole minute or so.

I can walk faster.

I think Exchange sucks, but Exchange doesn't suck that bad.

Does anyone know why is it that Outlook 2007 or 2003 is 'slower' instead of faster than it's predecessor ?

And yes, I know about the UDP-packet from the exchange server and the Windows XP firewall, that doesn't seem to be the problem.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[lukas84]

Buy a faster computer.

You're most likely using Cached Exchange Modes on 2003/2007. Outlook 2000 only knows Online Mode, where all the stuff happens on the (fast) server. Cached Exchange Mode moves most of the IO heavy stuff to the client. Especially with a large mailbox and a shitty old computer, speed will then be abysmal.

See http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/17/447750.aspx

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, sorry to rain on your parade, but there was shouting. Information moving at the speed of sound, just as far as your [yodel?] will carry.

Nobody has ever been able to run over Mach one to my knowledge, and the human voice as a communication medium is as old as the hills.

Or not quite... but it is surely as old as humanity.

To mangle the old addage a bit, information wants to move fast--whether by telephone, telegraph, or tellawoman.

Re:The First Time Information Outpaced Man

[Dire Bonobo]

>>> Before the semaphore telegraph a man could travel faster than information.

"The Egyptians and the Persians first used carrier pigeons 3,000 years ago. They also were used to proclaim the winner of the Olympics."

The ancient world was not so primitive as some might think.

Encrypted?

[tristian_was_here]

Would the messages be encrypted at all?

Re:Encrypted?

[iocat]

Yes.

Re:Encrypted?

[Constantine XVI]

isThay essagemay isway encryptedway.
Fb vf guvf bar.

Re:Encrypted?

[Repossessed]

1790 through about the mid 1800s... So they'd have been using a Vigenere cypher. (Invented in the 1500s, not cracked till the second half of the 18th century). One time pads may have been available at the time as well, though since the Vigenere was supposedly unbreakable (except by stealing the key of course), I doubt many would have gone to that kind of time and expense.

Bad pun, baaaaaaad pun....

[FooAtWFU]

Somebody mod this guy +5 *groan*.

Horses versus humans

[Tablizer]

Article: Humans or horses can maintain a speed of 5 or 6 kilometres an hour for long distances.

It may defy common sense, but a runner in top shape can almost match the pace of a horse over long distances. There used to be a yearly contest in England, and a human sometimes won. Our ancestors used to chase down pray by outlasting them in the heat (some isolated tribes still do). Our sweating system keeps us cooler than hairy animals. However, it may be more economical to wear out a horse than a human. Plus, a horse can carry more.

Re:Horses versus humans

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don' think they were chasing pray so much as praying they'd prey on prey.

Re:Horses versus humans

[Tony Hoyle]

'used to be'?

It's still run every year. http://llanwrtyd-wells.powys.org.uk/eventmanvhorsevbike.htm

These days they have bikes too.

Re:Horses versus humans

[FroBugg]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon has some more detailed information on the actual race. 22 miles, and it's been won by a human twice in its 27 year history.

Re:Horses versus humans

[demonlapin]

That's a nice story, but experience disagrees with you. Quadrupeds move much more efficiently than we do. We're smarter than they are, so we take advantage of their behaviors to kill and eat them. Driving herds off cliffs, e.g. However, the experience of the Plains Indians with horses pretty clearly shows that people will take any advantage they get and use it to master their surroundings. If people on horses were inferior to people on foot, they wouldn't have bothered to become expert horsemen.

Re:Horses versus humans

[ucblockhead]

Plus, a single person can switch horses. That's how the Pony Express worked, and it's how people could make 200 miles a day even in classical times.

Re:Horses versus humans

[Anonymous Coward]

He say: person >= horse
You say: not true because, person <= person on horse

person on horse != horse.

Re:Horses versus humans

[NoOneInParticular]

Horses have a particularly distinct advantage over humans is that they, over shorter distances, easily outrun humans, and can generally keep up with other animals. No sense in outrunning a bison if you lose sight of him in the first few miles. This is sufficient explanation for the general use of horses, regardless of humans matching their speed on the long haul.

Re:Horses versus humans

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick is to change horses often, so you can run them at high speed, without worrying about their lack of staying power. Using such a relay system, the Pony Express reportedly managed to get from coast to coast in as little as 10 days in the U.S... I don't know if such a system ever existed in Europe, but theoretically it should be able to get from Amsterdam to Venice in 3 days at Pony Express speeds.

Re:Horses versus humans

[demonlapin]

I know this is /., but really -- listen to the link, I didn't put it there just because it looks pretty. It'll take you the better part of an hour. It's a rather thorough account of a guy trying that theory out for real. He rapidly finds that antelope can outrun us with ease, and that all they have to do is get over the nearest hill for you to lose track of which specific antelope you're trying to run down. The way to kill bison and antelope without a mount is to drive them off a cliff in a stampede.

Re:Horses versus humans

[Dire Bonobo]

>>> That's a nice story, but experience disagrees with you.

Uh, dude? The story you link doesn't say what you suggested it did. At no point does it come to the conclusion that people can't run down antelopes. Indeed, the narrator seems to think it's likely, and that it's almost certain people did so historically.

Moreover, you put far too much stock in the ability of an aging ex-smoker, his nerdy brother with a heart problem, and a few of their friends to represent the utmost of human capabilities. The fact that none of them managed to run down an antelope doesn't really tell us a whole lot about whether a trained and fit group of hunters could do it.

For example, one of the problems the guys in this story talked about was identifying which antelope they'd started chasing; I would imagine that someone who hunted down antelope for a living would be rather better at antelope identification. As the narrator himself says, "The main problem is not the running; the main problem is knowledge of the terrain and the animal itself." He's certainly not going to have that, doing this a couple days at a time.

Indeed, the narrator describes the technique (as described by the natives he talked to) as a difficult technique that requires substantial knowledge and training, so his own failure tells us very little. Basically, it tells us that running down an antelope is at least very hard; not exactly a surprise.

Finally, it's worth noting that antelope are rather exceptional in their running capabilities, so if man cannot run down the world's best non-human distance runner, that doesn't tell us so much about whether man can run down typical quadrupeds.

For what it's worth, though, the narrator's own conclusion is that it's quite possible for someone fit enough and who knows what he's doing to run down an antelope. Listening to story and reading interviews by its narrator basically gives exactly the opposite impression you tried to give.

Re:Horses versus humans

[demonlapin]

Dang. You're right, and I must simply have misremembered the story's ending. I still think he's wrong, but it doesn't say what I thought it did.

My semaphore tower sucks

[Jesus_666]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you semaphore fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a semaphore tower (a 1860/300 w/64 flags) for about 20 weeks now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one city on the east coast to another city. 20 weeks. At home, on my dovecote running Columba livia domestica, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this semaphore tower, the same operation would take about 2 weeks. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, the newspaper will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even my inkwell is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various semaphore towers, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a semaphore tower that has run faster than its dove counterpart, despite the semaphore towers' faster signalling architecture. My pigeonry with 8 Columba palumbus' runs faster than this 300 flag-position machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the semaphore tower is a superior machine.

Semaphore addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a semaphore tower over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[realperseus]

Does your semaphore tower conform to RFC 4824? :-)

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you just won Slashdot. Congratulations.

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[begbiezen]

You obviously don't have a clue. Sure, your Columba palumbus "at times" gets it done, but it's hardly a replacement for the ultra-stable OpTow(v1.04) in a mission critical environment.
That's nice, you can get the news and updates at the same time. Wow. lets face it, dovecote users aren't serious "get things done" types. More like "it gets here when it gets here... check out them goats" types
An 1860/300 w/64 flags??
what is this the dark ages? (and you talk about faster signaling architecture -what a laugh)

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[zippthorne]

Pray tell, Mr. Hey-Soos triple-six, can you still send messages if you run out of birds?

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

The semaphore tower is more reliable and cheaper. You don't have to worry about your data link becoming some hawk's dinner, nor do you have to worry about feeding it. It is trivially easy to visually determine that your data was correctly copied. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that pigeons work at all.

dom

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

Pray tell, Mr. Hey-Soos triple-six, can you still send messages if you run out of birds?
That won't be a problem when you buy the Unlimited Connection Plan*


*Unlimited Connection Plan limited to 300 African Swallows a month.

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[Jesus_666]

I can still tear down the semaphore tower and wrap my message around the rocks. Granted, the range is somewhat limited, but if I broadcast to enough people I might get the newspapers to transmit the message.

Re:My semaphore tower sucks

[RealGrouchy]

Semaphore addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a semaphore tower over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems. Because the only other option in town is Comcast?

- RG>

Heliographs

[Anonymous Coward]

An alternative form was used in the Southwest by the US Army for commuication. It was basically a formalized system using flashing mirrors (well suited to the southwest environs).

Relayed Messages

[pipingguy]

purple monkey dishwasher

It's much older

[Antiocheian]

This communication system was used in the late Roman/Byzantine empire I think.

Re:omfg

[OECD]

The system didn't correct for transmission errors very well...

I know you're joking, but I wondered about that myself. TFA implies that there was, in fact, error correction: "If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly." I presume there was a way to make the correction (else, why check?)

Al?

[doogiesd]

How long before the claim that he invented this internet too?

Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[franois-do]

According to a legend that I did not verify, one of the Rotschild's became immensely rich because he knew before anybody else in London about the defeat of Napoleon in Waterloo : according to that legend, he bought a lot of stocks & shares because they were quite low, and could sell them when the news reached the press.

I am not sure it is true because the Chappe code was normally secret, so looking at the signs coould not really help. The operators themselves did not undertand what they were transmitting.

As our Italian friends say Si non e vero... ;-)

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[AI0867]

actually, the story was more interesting
-Rothschilds get information early
-other people know rothschilds get the information early
-rothschilds dump all their stock
-everyone else dumps their stock
-stock crashes
-rothschilds buy everything

massive stock manipulation, but I guess that was legal back then.

(or at least this is the version I heard)

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[siriuskase]

I thought the Rothchilds use carrier pigeons, a competing form of packet based communication.

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[Foobar of Borg]

I thought the Rothchilds use carrier pigeons, a competing form of packet based communication.

Yes, but their packets were more susceptible to malware, especially of the Hawk variety. A Beowulf cluster of Hawks was the ultimate in DOS attacks.

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[operagost]

So they did pump and dump scams back then, too?

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[instarx]

actually, the story was more interesting
-Rothschilds get information early
-other people know rothschilds get the information early
-rothschilds dump all their stock
-everyone else dumps their stock
-stock crashes
-rothschilds buy everything

massive stock manipulation, but I guess that was legal back then.

Actually this would be perfectly legal today. Getting public information faster than everyone else is smart, not illegal; and there is noting illegal about selling stock to drive the price down and then snapping up deals. Market-makers do it every day to shake out margin traders.

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[Raenex]

and there is noting illegal about selling stock to drive the price down and then snapping up deals. Market-makers do it every day to shake out margin traders. This was the central message of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It was called "swinging a big line". It's been claimed that the market is too big and diverse for this to happen in the modern world.

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[instarx]

This was the central message of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It was called "swinging a big line". It's been claimed that the market is too big and diverse for this to happen in the modern world.

You are probably right that markets as a whole are too big and too diverse, but I assure you that it happens a lot with individual stocks. Just look on the days approaching options contract settlement dates and you will see the share price of many stocks drop preciptously for no apparent reason. These are the market makers forcing down the price to force margin calls on investors. If the investors don't have the cash handy to cover the call they have to sell the stock, which the market makers snap up at a bargain.

On a smaller scale, a stock that is rising very fast during the day will often drop for 5-10 minutes before resuming its upward move. These temporary drops are caused by the market makers selling lots of shares, causing the stock to drop, at which point they buy their shares back at a lower price and a nice little profit. You or I can't do that, but the big boys can. Happens every day.

Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune

[Raenex]

You or I can't do that, but the big boys can. Happens every day. I believe you. I threw out the claim mainly to elicit a response :) I don't play in the markets, though I was considering it years ago before the dot-bust. I figured there were enough big players for this kind of manipulation to still be true. Many modern-day traders still recommend the Reminiscences book, even though it came out over 80 years ago.

Re:omfg

[mdenham]

I presume there was a way to make the correction Yes, probably by whistling extremely loudly. (Most people can't do a very loud whistle at two pitches separated by at least five semitones [to make things easier to distinguish], nor can they change pitches between those two very quickly, so whistled communication isn't very common as a substitute for things like this. It is, however, used by some groups. It's also extremely annoying to pull this over the phone. :-D)

Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Dan East]

Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy.

No they weren't, and the article doesn't say that they were. Man-in-the-middle attack means that transmitted data can be modified, or entirely new data can be introduced. Think about it. You have a telescope permanently aimed at the next station in line, viewed by a person who has spent thousands of hours staring at that station. Now don't you think if someone, somehow, got in that exact line of sight with their own semaphore in attempt to transmit their own data, that it would be extremely obvious to the operator that something was very wrong?

What the article does say is that the system is vulnerable to eavesdropping. However, a number of solutions would be available. Shutters could be used to restrict visibility of the semaphores to the line of sight of the next tower. Since they were elevated, it would be difficult to get into that line of sight in most terrain. Obviously, the messages themselves could be encrypted as well. The semaphore operators did not have to understand their message. They simply moved the position of their signaling arms to match the position of the sending tower. The sending tower would visually verify that the receiving tower had properly copied the data. The operators did not need to know what the data meant to relay the information - only the initiator and consumer of the information needed the ability to encrypt / decrypt, which is still where we stand today.

Telegraph was very much open to eavesdropping - in fact, I believe it was much easier. Simply pigtail off of any of the thousands of miles of wire, and run a line to a comfortable listening post out of sight of the railway or road. With radio it became even easier!

Dan East

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[kobotronic]

Your telescope is trained at the next semaphore tower, yes. But can you tell whether the operator sitting hidden beneath and pulling the levers is the person it is supposed to be, or perhaps some impostor who by use of force or bribery took over the controls? Isn't this a plausible injection vector for a man in the middle attack?

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Dan East]

No, because one of the towers on either side of that tower (depending on which direction the message was being transmitted) would see that data is being sent that was not being relayed from their tower. They could then invalidate the message by using some other method of messaging - physically bypassing the compromised tower by courier probably being the easiest and fastest.

Dan East

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[kobotronic]

Fair enough. So in order for this to work an attacker would have needed to subvert not just one tower but two towers in a row, and the towers must be situated such that the last un-subverted tower in line of the signal would not pick up on the failure of the first subverted tower to react to the obviously wrongly relayed message from the second corrupted tower.

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Dan East]

True. The fact of the matter is it is still easier to attack the successor to this system - wired telegraph. You can insert your signal at any point that you can pigtail off of the wire, and it is basically impossible (using technology of the era) to determine whether a signal is legitimate or from some 3rd party source. With hundreds of miles of wire, held up by thousands of poles, it would be easy to pigtail off the line in a very covert way.

Dan East

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Lennie]

I'm no expert, but this problem was (later ?) solved by (for example ?) Diffie & Hellman's key exchange protocol.

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough. So in order for this to work an attacker would have needed to subvert not just one tower but two towers in a row, and the towers must be situated such that the last un-subverted tower in line of the signal would not pick up on the failure of the first subverted tower to react to the obviously wrongly relayed message from the second corrupted tower. Presumably towers were spaced far enough apart so that you couldn't see the next-but-one tower in any direction under normal weather conditions (minimization of capital and running costs) so all you really need to do is to do a blindness-subvert of one tower (i.e. bribe so that they spend some particular time not looking) and a message-insert-subvert of the one adjacent. If messages are tagged with who/where they are directed to (so that you aren't broadcasting everything) which useful when you go away from a simple point-to-point system to a connected web, you have another injection possibility since you just insert the message at a junction and tag it so that the "wrong" directions ignore it.

This technique has been used in film.

Re:Man-in-the-middle attacks?

[Anonymous Coward]

The people operating the towers were, in effect, routers. In the modern age, routers are inanimate objects without agendas. Not so in the past. The 'man-in-the-middle' could literally be the one entrusted to relay the message.

Very Pratchett-esque

[Arancaytar]

The clacks, I think he called it?

IT IS THE 1790S AND THERE IS TIME FOR

[tepples]

...Clacks.

(reference)

Only on slashdot

[Colin Smith]

The irony of having to define the word "Wanker" to a bunch of mostly American nerds.

Re:Only on slashdot

[ScrewMaster]

Why is that ironic? Don't you have lightsaber practice with Captain Solo down under?

Re:Only on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

A Dutch friend of mine's still laughing about her unfortunately named American colleague, Mr. Randy Wanker.

Re:Only on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Still better than my former co-worker randy ho

Re:Spam? Bravo - and good on yer Issac

[chawly]

Isaac Bayes, yeah ... knew his brother Fred. Liked him.

And to this day, Fred's is the best filters. As they say around here, " All your filters are belong to .... Fred. And Fred said "ta!"

Discworld's clacks

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious geek reference of course is Diskworld's clacks towers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks

Telegraph in The Count of Monte Cristo

[ODBOL]

> Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy.

In Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, the climax of the Count's revenge uses a man-in-the-middle attack on the French telegraph system.

Chain e-mails

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the headline, anyone else think this would be about those chain emails that claim to have been circling since 1850, and If I don't pass them to 15 people, my car will crash, my pets will die, and my foot will explode?

the ancient Greeks

[xx_chris]

This technology goes way way back. The Aeschylus play Agamemnon (458 BC) opens with a watchman waiting at an optical telegraph tower for the outcome of the siege of Troy.

Re:the ancient Greeks

[Anonymous Coward]

See The Oresteia. I doubt this was an actual telegraph tower, it was probably more like the beacons of Gondor, but still I think that parent should have gotten a higher score than 1.

more more

[edsger]

http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=253EE806-FA7B-4693-8F1D-BDBB1E68AAF is an article i wrote many moons ago for scientific american on these optical telegraph networks more info still, in this book: http://spinroot.com/gerard/hist.html

Email??

[iminplaya]

You mean eyemail , right? iMail? If they were pirates, it was AY!mail

Re:Email??

[Bilby Baggins]

In Judea, was it OY!mail? /i keed, i keed // Judea People's Front forever! ///eeee-tay, eeee-tay! conjugate the verb!

avian carriers

[davidwr]

I don't think the IRC for IP packets over equine carriers has been drafted yet.

Re:avian carriers

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

I don't think the IRC for IP packets over equine carriers has been drafted yet.
Really? Sounds like the Pony Express to me.

So...

[wilec]

The Precolumbian native cultures of North America, the Scots, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese, and probably pretty much most other cultures had used fires, smoke and signal mirrors made of shiny metals like silver centuries before this.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

Only on slashdot-Stickies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? What do you call it overseas? Slap-stick?

Re:omfg

[seyyah]

TFA implies that there was, in fact, error correction: "If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly." I presume there was a way to make the correction (else, why check?)
I imagine there was a measure of error correction, but the reason for checking the following tower might just be to know when you could put up your next symbol. That control would be necessary while error correction would be a luxury.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the idiot with the fohootville thing again.

The Beacon of Minas Tirith

[johnrpenner]

lord of the rings had one of these -- the beacons of minis tirith
signalled using blazing torches in towers just like this. :)

MITM

[rpetre]

A man-in-the-middle attack was described in "Count of Monte Cristo" (purposeful fake information caused a stock crash and the bancruptcy of a particular villain).

europe, north america, AND ..

[buttle2000]

I know slashdot is primarily a white boy middle class thing, but do please try to remember that you are not the only ones on the planet. Other cultures did this sort of thing too.

Why not give them a break?

Count of Monte Cristo

[godless dave]

"Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy."

That's actually a plot point in the unabridged "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas (pere). The Count bribes a telegraph operator to let him run the equipment, and sends a fake message about Juan Carlos returning to Spain. Baron Danglars dumps all his Spanish bonds based on this false insider information.

I agree

[commodoresloat]

All these semaphore fanatics have been completely duped by the Claude Chappe Reality Distortion Field.

Light modulation

[PhotoGuy]

These "optical telegraphs" really are just a (far) more primitive form of laser relays. Both modulate light (moving of flags, pulsing of a laser) to be received at the other end (by human eyeballs, or an electronic laser receiver). I once worked for a company with two offices in a town, and used a high speed laser link to connect the two lans. It worked surprirsingly well (except on very foggy days :().

payload smuggling

[mm4]

What's also interesting is that payload smuggling (there's a name for this in security field, but I can't recall it at the moment) was taking place in France - a couple of brother traders used to bribe telegraph operators to make "errors" in which they encoded their own messages that were essentially giving them the opportunity to do arbitrage trading between Bordeaux and Paris. When they were discovered they were exhiled from France and went to Monaco to set up the gambling business. Details on this and many more interesting things can be found in "Introduction To Financial Technology" http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Financial-Technology-Complete-Services/dp/0123704782

Modded as interesting?

[SCHecklerX]

Did anyone, like, check the dates on those RFCs?

Urban legend

[supercrisp]

From Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

Re:Urban legend

[doogiesd]

An exact quote to the SENTENCE.. "I took the initiative in CREATING THE INTERNET." He said it... Deal with it...

Re:Urban legend

[jbengt]

to get a fuller picture of the quotes from the above referenced article:

". . . during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March, 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. . . ' "

"If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while President, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway."

". . . he sponsored the 1988 National High-Performance Computer Act (which established a national computing plan and helped link universities and libraries via a shared network) and cosponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 (which opened the Internet to commercial traffic)."

so yeah, let's all call him a liar based on misquotes pushed by his political opponents.

The grandparent was correct... Deal with it...

Kindly desist.

[Bloke down the pub]

Sir, you are to talking like a Limey what an elephant is to pole vaulting, and a three legged elephant at that.

RFCs 1149 & 2549

[whitroth]

The obvious answer to this....

            mark

Old news...

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of commnunication was seen in The Count of Monte Cristo (old book, various movies), including a 'man in the middle' attack carried out as part of the plot.

BigFig

fabulous post, my vote for best of year

[cinnamon colbert]

would that/. had more like this

The Incas beat them to it

[thisisauniqueid]

Not to mention that the Incas were doing this more than 1500 years earlier... they had an extensive network of towers that could relay messages using reflections off metalic surfaces, smoke signals, or horn-blowing in foggy conditions. They could pass messages hundreds of miles across the Inca empire in very short periods of time.

Mutexes?

[John Guilt]

What did they worship? There weren't even any normal nuclear weapons around back then, much less an alpha/omega device....

avian carriers

[wikinerd]

they could have had IP as well if they used avian carriers

I think you're wrong, Dan.

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree, and I don't believe that your comment is insightful. It would be trivial to attack an actual tower by subversion or force (granted, the other towers would have to not notice, but I believe that it could be accomplished). I believe this qualifies as a man in the middle attack. Making your own tower is definitely nonsense but why would anybody do that when it would be much easier to simply attack an existing tower?

Re:The Count of Monte Cristo

[James VAR]

Modern-day optical connections get Monte Carlo interference.

Heliographs

[Ambitwistor]

First recorded use of a heliograph: 405 BC, metal shields used to shine signals across a battlefield.