Email In the 18th Century 279
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."
Spam? (Score:4, Funny)
"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"
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Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune (Score:2, Interesting)
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 transmitt
Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune (Score:5, Informative)
-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)
Re:Chappe's telegraph and buiding of a fortune (Score:4, 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.
Actually this would be perfectly legal today. Getting public information faster than everyone else is smart, not illegal; and there is noting illegal about selling stock to drive the price down and then snapping up deals. Market-makers do it every day to shake out margin traders.
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Re:Spam? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [amazon.com]. 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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In the same way as the transistor had in the first years of its existence? The vacuum tubes' manufacturers certainly also didn't want to give up. Even though the technological progress was already accelerating in the begin
Re:Spam? (Score:4, Informative)
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In an 18th-century British accent: "Oh bloody hell, I shall not need my wanker any bloody bigger! May the Queen assign lasting damnation upon your deplorable message."
Re:Spam? (Score:4, Informative)
I live in fear that this may be marked informative.
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So my dick-tionary is wrong?
Only on slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Spam? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spam? (Score:5, Funny)
And to this day, most spam filters are still called 'Bayesian filters.'
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I doubt it for simple economical reasons. Theese networks were probablly more expensive to use than the postal service and unsolicited bulk messages aren't really very urgent.
Light the Fires (Score:5, Funny)
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Postal mail used to be pretty good, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
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Re:Postal mail used to be pretty good, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, there is a good book called The Victorian Internet that, despite its suspect name, is extremely well written and goes into great and fascinating depth on the telegraph (optical and electronic), as well as the pro-tech savvy of the Victorian age. I'm too lazy to put in a link for you, but I assure you, the google or the amazon can give you all the details.
Progress (Score:2)
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If you want something delivered in a hurry you can still get that service but you will have to pay a lot for it because the demand is sufficiantly low that someone will have to make a special journey. The reason the demand is low is because the phone network provides similar services at higher speed and lower cost for messages and there aren't that many people sending packages that are that urgent.
That is progress, high fr
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Presumablly they did it because thier was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it and there was sufficiant demand to make it worth doing it because other means of communication were too expensive to be common.
If you wanted service and delivery times that good these days, you'd need to go with a courier service.
Yes because it doesn't make sense to do mass rounds for a service only a few people require.
Ah, Clacks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ah, Clacks (Score:5, Funny)
IT IS THE 1790S AND THERE IS TIME FOR (Score:2)
(reference [wikipedia.org])
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but (Score:5, Funny)
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You know what I'm talking about... Oh! - Oh! - Oh!...
Re:but (Score:4, Funny)
Clacks! (Score:2, Interesting)
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"Minor" mistake but... (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
RTFA! (Score:2, Informative)
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Not an excuse for poorly written summaries that obfuscate the true message of the article.
Re:KMFA!!! (RTFA)! (Score:2)
It's a slow news day... perhaps you are trying to say that whoever approved the summary on /. should have read the article so they would have gotten the summary correct?
My problem isn't an inability to read the article... whoever wrote the title and summary seem to have had that problem.
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The first century began at 1 and ended, duh, at 100. The second century began at, duh, 101, and ended at, duh, 200.
The fact that You can't keep track of such simplicity is no reason to blame somebody else for your ineptness.
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The fact that it tripped up another slashdotter is evidence that it is a common tripper. It's just best to avoid such terminology if it has a history of being misinterpreted. Make the terms fit humans, not the other way around. And, a perfectly good alternative is "In the 1700's" (seventeen-hundreds).
Re:"Minor" mistake but... (Score:5, Informative)
The compiler is more than capable of doing this transformation. The real reason is because the vast majority of algorithms are easier to describe with the first index as zero -- this was a lesson learned from FORTRAN, which started indexing at 1.
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I doubt they were related, because if they *had* started indexing centuries at zero like C (which is the One Correct Way to index anything) then we wouldn't have this stupid century/year dissonance..
did china do this as well on the great wall? (Score:2)
Re:did china do this as well on the great wall? (Score:4, Informative)
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And I guess Native Americans' smoke signals would count also.
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The Internet Brain [wikipedia.org] talks a little about this a little bit, including some potential references to look at.
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The roman signal stations are still on the Ordnance Survey maps in Perthshire [streetmap.co.uk] 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 [wikipedia.org] which was some 100km north of the famous Hadrians Wall.
So this is
Semaphores and smoke signals are ancient (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [ietf.org]. Presumably, this is more efficient than delivering the same traffic by animal transport [ietf.org] but less efficient than by wire or radio.
Telegraph Hill in San Francisco (Score:5, Interesting)
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patent trolls (Score:3, Funny)
The Victorian Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
i have a great comment (Score:5, Funny)
my comment is currently being transmitted from schenectady to poughkeepsie and the bad weather is interfereing with the candles staying lit
Common in Italy in the middle agaes (Score:3, Informative)
So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow! (Score:3, Funny)
My semaphore tower sucks (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Sempahore towers (Score:3, Informative)
There are still some left in Barbados:
http://photo.clifford.ac/2007/Barbados.October/tn/dscn2211.jpg.index.html [clifford.ac]
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 [clifford.ac]
--
Alan clifford
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Napoleon used these... (Score:2)
18th? (Score:2)
Theory goes that long before that the ancient pagans of Europe did a similar thing near stonehenge.
They're in an old movie too (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Yes, that's it then. I knew it was in the book, which I read as an adult, but wasn't sure what movie that was as I saw it so long ago.
Sorry, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Read The Victorian Internet (Score:2, Informative)
Fax History (Score:2, Interesting)
Signal guns (Score:2)
taggers are fucking illiterate (Score:5, Informative)
BEACONS.
If you can't afford a dictionary, rednecks, at least Google.
Re:taggers are fucking illiterate (Score:5, Funny)
Semaphores weren't the first (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Bad pun, baaaaaaad pun.... (Score:2)
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"Virus" (Score:4, Funny)
Back then when a "node was infected with a virus", it was literal.
The First Time Information Outpaced Man (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Horses versus humans (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It's still run every year. http://llanwrtyd-wells.powys.org.uk/eventmanvhorsevbike.htm [powys.org.uk]
These days they have bikes too.
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Relayed Messages (Score:2)
Man-in-the-middle attacks? (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Dan East
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Very Pratchett-esque (Score:2)
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"S... E... N... D... send, F... A... R... C... E... S... farces?!"
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The system didn't correct for transmission errors very well...
I know you're joking, but I wondered about that myself. TFA implies that there was, in fact, error correction: "If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly." I presume there was a way to make the correction (else, why check?)