On This Day in History: March 2

The first semaphore stations

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As a boy I watched the 1975 Richard Chamberlain adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. In one scene Edmond Dantès bribes the operator of a semaphore station to send false information that will financially ruin a target of Dantès’s revenge. What’s a semaphore station? It’s an optical telegraph that sends messages over vast distances not by wire, but by sight.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 2, 1791--

In elementary school I learned about flag semaphore, a form of sign language that allowed people to communicate with each other via vast distances by holding colored flags in various positions to indicate letters and numbers. But such a system didn’t come about until 1866. Giant towers with masts atop them that had movable signal arms predated the flags by several decades.

Long distance messaging systems were nothing new. The hydraulic telegraph (google it) dates back to the 4th century BCE. And the ancient Chinese were using smoke signals before that. But French inventor Claude Chappe wanted a more technically advanced system, and on March 2, 1791, he demonstrated it by sending signals 10 miles between the towns Brûlon and Parcé. The inaugural message was chosen by officials in Brûlon and given to René Chappe to send to his brother Claude, who had no advance knowledge of the message. It read, “If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory.”

The French Revolutionary Wars would soon begin; throughout history the military has often sought out technological advantages to help them defeat their enemies. World War II may have super sucked, but the amount of new shit that arose out of that conflict represents one of the greatest periods of technological advancement in human history.

The following year, Chappe was charged with creating a 140-mile line of semaphore machines, each averaging ten miles apart, to communicate between Paris and Lille, a city in North France. The reason? Fucking war with Austria. Needed it for military dispatches. It could pass a full message from one end to the other via 15 semaphore stations in about half an hour. It would take a fast horse messenger two days to travel that distance. Six years later they had a 300-mile line set up between Paris and Strasbourg. Five years after that semaphore stations were set up along the coast to warn of British invasion. Napoleon used the system to obtain information about enemy troop movements.

Interestingly, Alexandre Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844, and based the bribing of a semaphore operator on a real event. A decade previous, two bankers bribed the operators at a station near Tours to insert secret codes into official messages to communicate what had just happened on the Paris stock exchange. This was received by an accomplice in Bordeaux who used that advance information to make a fortune. The scheme operated for two years before they were discovered.

Many other nations copied Chappe’s system. It fell into disuse in the middle of the 19th century due to the development of the wire telegraph.

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