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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."
Gondor needs help.
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.
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.
Was the Optical Telegraph networked described by the clueless politicians of the time as a "series of flags"?
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.'
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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)
Well, I can assume that once you reach a certain proficiency, you can be called a MASTERbator.
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)
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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