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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."
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"
Gondor needs help.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Apparently where Terry Pratchett got the clacks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clacks
If it was "wireless and without need for electricity", then it was not electronic mail
Particles, stuff that matters.
"S... E... N... D... send, F... A... R... C... E... S... farces?!"
Those are the clacks! Did they have c-commerce back then, too? And clacksites?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
"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.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In other news, NTP is now looking for someone to sue over this infringing technology.
Tom Standage's book covered this quite well.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Link
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.
Was the Optical Telegraph networked described by the clueless politicians of the time as a "series of flags"?
Looks like the Victorians could copy and transmit data faster than Windows Vista!
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
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
For more detail, read The Victorian Internet. It is an awesome book.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Table-ized A.I.
BEACONS of Gondor, for Sauron's sake.
BEACONS.
If you can't afford a dictionary, rednecks, at least Google.
you had me at #!
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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... ;-)
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
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
Better known as 318230.
The irony of having to define the word "Wanker" to a bunch of mostly American nerds.
Deleted
With such a poor understanding of economics, it's surprising you were ever able to afford a computer!
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
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