Alphabetical (37 page)

The ampersand sign itself is another story.

The Latin word for ‘and' is ‘et'. If you draw a curly capital ‘E' and a small ‘t', joining and compressing the two letters into a kind of monogram, you can see the origin of ‘&'. It seems to have developed in the first century in Roman cursive handwriting, went into medieval manuscripts and thence into the first typefaces. The most common place I saw it when I was a child was in company and shop names, the most important by far in the life of someone wanting sweets and toys: F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd.

Semaphore with flags is a signalling-system based on the letters of the alphabet. When I was in the ‘cubs' in the 1950s, we had to learn how to do it, in order to pass to a higher level of cubmanship. It involves holding two flags. The trick we were taught as a way of remembering the semaphore alphabet was to think of the positions of the two flags as if you were standing in the centre of a clock-face, and you pointed your arms holding the flags out from your body as if your arms were the hands of a clock. Though we used to signal to each other across a hall or yard, there were occasions when you could see sailors perform it for show. I'm not sure that I realized at the time that before the age of telegraphs, telephones and radio, any kind of visual signalling system could relay messages across vast distances, so long as each relay station could see the one it was picking up from.

Robert Hooke, the polymath scientist, figured this out and presented it as a viable idea to the Royal Society in 1684. As is often the case, the demand for such a system did not arise out of the need to improve the human condition but from a war, a particularly pressing matter, according to Hooke, on account of the Siege of Vienna the year before. The Fellows didn't nibble on Hooke's scheme, so it stayed on the back burner until Claude Chappe invented a visual signalling system in 1792, straight after the French Revolution.

Things didn't get off to a perfect start, because when he first demonstrated it in the Place d'Etoile, republican Parisians thought that he was secretly trying to communicate with the Royalists, and smashed it up. Once established, it worked by using 556 stations covering a distance of some 3,000 miles. Here again, the need was military, with the perceived or real enemies of the Revolution encircling France. The system depended on towers being placed some 10–20 miles apart, with two articulated arms placed on the top. The positions of the arms related to letters. The first line ran from Paris to Lille; other lines radiated out from Paris across France. Napoleon used it a few years later but it didn't bring much pleasure to Chappe who ended his life throwing himself down a hotel well-shaft.

Visual signalling systems had been around, probably for thousands of years, using fire or smoke. The Romans used a hydraulic system and during the first Punic War they sent messages between Sicily and Carthage. On each of two hills facing each other was an identical earthenware container, each with an identical plug and plughole. Each container was filled with water and a vertical rod fixed in it. Each rod was marked identically down its shaft with likely events in the war: ‘cavalry arrived', ‘infantry arrived' and the like. At one container on one hill stood the sender; at the other, the receiver. The sender would choose which message
he wanted to send and raise his torch; the receiver raised his torch and this synchronized the pulling out of the plug of each container. Torches were lowered while the water ran out. When the water level sank to the point that revealed the desired message on the vertical rod, the sender would raise his torch again and stop the flow. The receiver would do the same, and read off the message on the vertical rod in his container.

All this was written up by the Greek historian Polybius who didn't spend his time in luxury hotels making up this stuff, but made great efforts to visit the places he wrote about and to interview the people who had witnessed the events. Some two thousand years after the Roman hydraulic signalling system, an English engineer called Francis Wilshaw proposed something very similar, except that the containers holding the water were to be connected. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't commercially viable.

Hydraulic systems are potentially quite secret. They are under water. Chappe's flailing arms on towers couldn't cope with bad weather and anyone with access to the code could read them. In other words, not secret.

Flag semaphore was in place by the time of the Battle of Trafalgar and it too features in fiction, most notably for me and my imaginative life in Arthur Ransome's
Winter Holiday, Missee Lee, Pigeon Post
, and in no end of skulduggery – usually with smugglers in the China Sea, in the
Boy's Own Paper
. The semaphore method used here was flashing Morse code with a torch. On camping holidays, my friends and I would try to imitate this by using our rubber-coated torches, signalling from tent-door to tent-door, whilst trying to make sure that the enemies (our parents) couldn't see.

One way in which a flag semaphore signal was frozen and has since been reproduced a million times is with the sign that is variously known as meaning ‘nuclear disarmament for Britain',
‘peace' and ‘no nuclear power stations'. It initially appeared on 500 cardboard lollipops on sticks on the first march from London to Aldermaston in 1958.

I ran away from home to join the third march and the origins of the sign were already in dispute. (I say ‘ran away from home' but what happened was that I said I was going on the march, my parents said that at thirteen I was too young, I said I wasn't, my mother made me sandwiches and gave me a chicken while telling me that I most definitely wasn't going, and I went, partly inspired by the mystery and mystique of this new sign.)

I was told then that the lines represented the letters ‘N' and ‘D', standing for ‘nuclear disarmament', and with my vast knowledge acquired through having been a cub (not that cubbing was very nuclear-disarmament-ish) I could confirm that. For others, tramping along the road from Aldermaston (where nuclear weapons were and still are manufactured) to London, singing, ‘Kumbaya' and ‘Have you heard the H-bomb thunder . . .?', this was far-fetched cobblers. They said that it was an ancient Sanskrit sign for peace. At school, some people drew it on their exercise books. Some of them got it wrong, and drew it like the company sign for Mercedes-Benz.

Half of the original ‘lollipop sticks' with the sign were black-on-white and half white-on-green. Just as the Church's liturgical colours change over Easter, so the colours were to change ‘from Winter to Spring, from Death to Life'. Black and white would be displayed on Good Friday and Saturday, green and white on Easter Sunday and Monday. The first badges were made by Eric Austin of Kensington CND, using white clay with the symbol painted black, and distributed with a note explaining that in the event of a nuclear war, these fired pottery badges would be amongst the few human artifacts to survive the nuclear inferno.

They were designed by Gerald Holtom, a conscientious
objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War, and, according to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he ‘confirmed' that the symbol uses the semaphore letters ‘N' for nuclear and ‘D' for disarmament. He wrote later: ‘I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.'

So, was it Gerald Holtom's arms, semaphore for ‘ND', or both?

Someone said that the whole thing was more sinister. It was the sign on the side of the tanks in the 3rd Panzer Division. Before the days of the internet, this was hard to confirm or deny. In fact, this was not only cobblers, it was nasty cobblers. The Panzer sign doesn't include the vertical line running all the way to the bottom of the circle. Holtom worked as a designer. The truth is that he incorporated both ideas – the outstretched arms of despair and the outstretched arms of a semaphore signaller. His first designs are now in the archive at the Commonwealth Collection in Bradford.

Morse code is an alphabetic sign system. Dots and dashes are produced by creating short or long electric impulses. Each letter has its own dot-and-dash configuration. ‘A' is dot-dash; ‘M' is dash-dash; ‘Z' is dash-dash dot-dot. The numbers have dot-dash configurations too. The code is named after Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872), a highly accomplished portrait painter. He was born in Massachusetts to a Calvinist preacher who worked hard at drumming Calvinist ideas into his son. Samuel Morse studied at Yale and began painting. His interest took him to the Royal Academy in London where he practised life drawing and
sculpture. In the years after this he became one of America's most respected and famous artists, once painting President James Monroe – he of the Monroe Doctrine of staying out of the US's backyard. On a visit to Paris in 1839, Morse chummed up with Louis Daguerre who had invented the daguerreotype, the first practical means of making photographic images.

In 1825, the city of New York commissioned Morse to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, a republican hero. While Morse was painting, a horse messenger delivered a letter from his father that read one line: ‘Your dear wife is convalescent.' Morse immediately left Washington for his home at New Haven, leaving the portrait of Lafayette unfinished. By the time he arrived, his wife had already been buried. For days Morse had been unaware of his wife's illness and her lonely death. This motivated him to turn away from painting and find some means of rapid long-distance communication.

In 1832, Morse met up with one Charles Thomas Jackson who knew a thing or two about electromagnetism. Morse watched Jackson at work and figured out the concept of a single-wire telegraph. By the time he got his patent, William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone and Carl Gauss had also developed an electromagnetic telegraph. Cheapness and convenience would determine which system would become the most popular and last the longest. At the time, what seems to have bothered Morse the most was whether he was the first. People who develop language systems frequently become extremely agitated by others in the same field. Leonard Gale, who taught Chemistry at New York University, helped Morse introduce relays into his system so that messages could be sent further, and with money coming in from one Alfred Vail, together they were able to put on a public demonstration at the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey on 11 January 1838. The first publicly transmitted
message was ‘A patient waiter is no loser', which to my ear carries a touch of Morse's Calvinist background. After several tries Morse got backing from Congress for his system. Having won over his native land, he set up other telegraph lines in Istanbul for Sultan Abdülmecid. Latin America and the whole of Europe – bar Great Britain – adopted it, with Britain sticking with Cooke and Wheatstone's system for the time being.

Does ‘SOS' mean ‘save our souls' or ‘save our sausages'? In fact, it is not an acronym or an abbreviation. The SOS's dots and dashes (short and long signals) were chosen because, as a combination, it was distinct and without ambiguity. In fact it is an example of the Morse code being non-alphabetic. It has been pointed out that it could also signify the message ‘VTB'. But then, I'm thinking that this could be translated into ‘Very troubled blokes' for all-male distress moments.

Paul Passy was an originator of another sign system. He was born in 1859 into a famous French family – his father Frédéric was one of the first people to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Young Passy learned English, German and Italian, and went on to study Sanskrit at university. He spent ten years as a language teacher in state schools as an alternative to doing military service. In 1886, he gathered together a small group of language teachers to encourage the use of phonetic notation in schools to help children pronounce foreign languages and to improve the teaching of reading. The group originally called themselves Dhi Fonètik Tîcerz' Asóciécon (the FTA). By 1897, they were L'Association Phonétique Internationale (API), or, in English, the International Phonetic Association (IPA). The IPA's early peak of membership and influence in education circles was around 1914, when there were 1,751 members in forty countries. The First World War not only broke up the Association's
activities, but French militarism and Passy's pacifism led to his dismissal from his chair at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes on the grounds that he opposed an extension to conscription.

It was the work of Passy's group of teachers which led to the creation of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the world's first truly universal alphabet, in which each symbol corresponds directly to a distinctive sound or ‘speech segment'. It has been adapted and improved since the late 1880s, with its core sign system, the roman alphabet. There are many other symbols: inverted letters, diacritics, Greek letters, ‘hooks' added to letters, along with signs like
and
making up some 150 symbols or so. It is most commonly sighted in Oxford dictionaries, as a guide to pronunciation; linguists all over the world use it, though Passy's pacifist and universalist ideals have not entirely won the day. The Americanist Phonetic Alphabet is an alternative system of phonetic notation originally developed by anthropologists for the transcription of Native American and European languages and still used by linguists working on Slavic, Indic, Uralic, Semitic and Caucasian languages. There are always alternatives. Perhaps that is the core meaning of this book.