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

Ah, Clacks

[The Grey Ghost]

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

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: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". )