Well into the eld of email , we ’re used to lightning quick communication . Waving around old flags looks pretty silly now . But this method of signaling was once built into a revolutionary communication connection , and you would n’t consider how fast it could go .
There was once a time when the libertine fashion to get news program , of any kind , was “ horse . ” And horse be active at a speed of about thirteen miles per hour , provided both it and its passenger could move at a gallop . A horse going from Venice to Amsterdam made it in about half a week . A carrier pigeon would make it in half the fourth dimension – provided the hiss made it at all . Something had to be done , and so the telegraph was invented – in 1791 . The seventeen hundred was not the golden years of technology . Although , like all centuries , it had its advances , scientific equipment was still the field of the gentleman scientist and the rarefied learner . Society was still await the prim Age ’s leap forwards in engineering and substructure . But it was n’t the electric telegraphy that first shrunk communication time . It was the optical telegraph .
tugboat were built about twelve miles apart , each have a telescope and a little wooden semaphore with two arms . Each arm could be put in one of seven positions . Each wooden semaphore could be turned in four positions . The lead 196 entire positions allow plenty dissimilar signals , all of which could mean a letter , a sure particular code , or a often - used phrase . Each telegraph operator look at the last tower to get a symbol , change his own symbol with the use of a lever , and then swiveled his telescope around to check which letter the last someone had put up . The symbolisation came at the rate of three per minute – necessitating economy in the number of words used , but the towers were massive success .
The French were the first to build a internet . They were in the grip of the Revolution , and trying their hand at more scientific ways to do everything , from communication to time guardianship . Naturally , they were fighting at their borders with other land , and the first subject matter of the optical telegraph , going from Lille to Paris with happy news of a victory over the Austrians , moved at eight hundred and fifty miles an 60 minutes , moving faster than distinctive modern planes .
The tower organization blossomed over Europe and over America . Towers sprang up over France , Sweden , and down into Spain and Italy . The towers were n’t really desegregate across body politic , since electricity reared its more - dependable head before the system could be firmly established , but the content that would take calendar week in the paw of a man , and days by animal messenger could suddenly make it from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour .
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