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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."
Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks
"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.
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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.
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
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Alan clifford
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.
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.
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
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."
Table-ized A.I.
For more detail, read The Victorian Internet. It is an awesome book.
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Rolo D. Monkey
BEACONS of Gondor, for Sauron's sake.
BEACONS.
If you can't afford a dictionary, rednecks, at least Google.
you had me at #!
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.
Note: A wanker is the term for a person who masterbates. "A wanker wanks".
I live in fear that this may be marked informative.
Note: It's spelled "masturbates", wanker.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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)
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
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". )
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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.
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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.
From Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
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.
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