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

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.