The Victorian Internet (2 page)

Chappe-style optical telegraph, showing arm positions corresponding to different letters Mounted on the roof of a tower, the
arms were controlled from the inside by an operator

A committee was duly appointed, consisting of Joseph Lakanal, a respected scientist; Louis Arbogast, a professor of mathematics;
and Pierre Claude Francois Daunou, a legislator and historian. Money was allocated for the construction of a line of three
telegraph stations in Belleville, Ecouen, and Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, spanning a distance of about twenty miles. If a message
could be passed along a network of three towers successfully, the system would obviously work with a larger number of towers
over greater distances. Following the Chappe brothers' run-in with the Paris mob, the mayors of each of the three towns were
made responsible for the safety of the telegraphs and their operators.

Within a few weeks the towers had been constructed, and the committee was invited to a demonstration on July 12, 1793. Transmission
of the first message began at 4:26 P.M., with two operators at each station, one operating the little whirling arms, the other
watching the next station through a telescope. The position of the arms at the sending station was reported by the observer
in the middle station, where the operator would then move the arms to form the same signal; each signal was held in place
for a few seconds, and the message rippled down the line to the receiving station. The three telegraph towers took eleven
minutes to send a rather boring message ("DAUNOU HAS ARRIVED HERE. HE ANNOUNCED THAT THE NATIONAL CONVENTION HAS JUST AUTHORIZED
HIS COMMITTEE OF GENERAL SECURITY TO PUT SEALS ON THE PAPERS OF THE DEPUTIES") along the line one way, and nine minutes to
send an equally nondescript reply back again. But the experiment was a success; the committee members, and Lakanal in particular,
were highly impressed.

Two weeks later Lakanal addressed the convention in glowing terms on the potential of this great new invention, and how wonderful
it was that it had been invented by a Frenchman. "What brilliant destiny do science and the arts not reserve for a republic
which, by the genius of its inhabitants, is called to become the nation to instruct Eu­rope," he gushed. Much of his enthusiasm
seems to have stemmed from the potential application of the telegraph in holding the newly founded French Republic together,
by ensuring that the central government in Paris could keep a firm grip on the provinces. At any rate, following his speech,
the construction of a fifteen-station line from Paris to Lille, about 13o miles to the north, was proposed. Chappe was put
on a government salary, complete with the use of a horse.

The Paris-Lille line, the first arm of the French State Telegraph, started operation in May 1794, and on August 15 it was
used to report the recapture of a town from the Austrians and Prussians within an hour of the battle's end. As the French
army advanced north into Holland, further victories were reported via the telegraph, and the government's appreciation for
Chappe's invention grew. By 1798, a second line had been built to the east of Paris as far as Strasbourg, and the Lille line
had been extended to Dunkirk.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in 1799, was a firm believer in the telegraph; he ordered further extension of the network,
including the construction of a line to Boulogne in preparation for an invasion of England. He also asked Abraham Chappe,
Claude's younger brother, to design a telegraph capable of signaling across the English Channel. (A successful prototype was
built and tested between Belleville and Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, the two stations on the original experimental line, the distance
between which was roughly equivalent to the shortest distance across the Channel. The station on the French side was later
installed in Boulogne, but Napoleon's plans for the invasion never materialized, so neither did the British station.) In 1804,
Napoleon ordered the construction of a line from Paris to Milan, via Dijon, Lyons, and Turin. This was to expand the network
farther than ever before.

Lakanal's prediction had by this time come true, and France had indeed become "the nation to instruct Eu­rope." Recognizing
the military value of the telegraph, the governments of other European countries, notably Sweden and Rritain, had quickly
copied Chappe's design or adopted variations upon it. In Britain, the Admiralty ordered the construction of a line of telegraph
towers in 1795 to facilitate communication between London and the ports of the south coast during the war with France. The
British telegraph was designed by George Murray, a clergyman and amateur scientist, and it consisted of six wooden shutters,
each of which could be opened or closed to give sixty-four possible combinations (since 64 = 2X2X2X2X2X2 = 2
⁶
). Soon, telegraph towers were springing up all over Europe.

T
HE TELEGRAPH SYSTEM was rightly regarded as a technological wonder of its time. An entry in the 1797 edition of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
strikes a note of technological optimism that sounds familiar today: "The capitals of distant nations might be united by chains
of posts, and the settling of those disputes which at present take up months or years might then be accomplished in as many
hours." The author of the encyclopedia entry also suggested that it might be worth opening up the network to paying customers:
"An establishment of telegraphs might then be made like that of the post; and instead of being an expense, it would produce
a revenue."

British shutter telegraph, 1797. Each of the six panels could be open (horizontal) or closed (vertical, as shown), giving
a total of sixty-four different combinations.

Chappe also had all sorts of ambitious plans for his invention; he hadn't intended its use to be so predominantly military
in nature, and wanted to promote its employment in business. He suggested a European network relaying commodity prices between
Paris and Amsterdam, Cadiz, and even London via a cross-Channel telegraph. He also advocated a state-sanctioned daily national
news bulletin. But Napoleon rejected both ideas, though he did agree to allow the weekly transmission of winning national
lottery numbers. This meant the numbers were known throughout the country on the day of the draw, dramatically reducing the
level of cheating.

But despite the success of his invention, Claude Chappe was not a happy man. He faced increasing criticism from rival inventors,
who claimed either to have invented superior forms of telegraph or to have had the idea for the telegraph before him. Even
his former associate, the clock maker Breguet, turned against him and claimed to have contributed far more to Chappe's design
than simply the control mechanism. Chappe sank into a deep depression and became increasingly paranoid, even going as far
as to accuse his rivals of having slipped something into his food when he suffered from a bout of food poisoning. Finally,
on January 23, 1805, he killed himself by jumping into the well outside the Telegraph Administration building in Paris. He
was buried under a tombstone decorated with a telegraph tower showing the sign for "at rest."

Even so, his invention continued to flourish; by the mid-1830s, lines of telegraph towers stretched across much of western
Europe, forming a sort of mechanical Internet of whirling arms and blinking shutters, and passing news and official messages
from one place to another. The continental network eventually reached from Paris to Per-pignan and Toulon in the south, Amsterdam
in the north, and from Brest in the west to Venice in the east, with other networks in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and
Rrit-ain bringing the total number of telegraph towers in Europe to almost a thousand.

a
s THE NETWORK GREW, telegraph fever took hold in Britain, where amateur scientists, part-time inventors, and quacks were
soon hard at work devising improvements to the nation's telegraphs. The Admiralty, which had spent much of the eighteenth
century fending off idiotic suggestions about the best way to determine longitude at sea, now found itself on the receiving
end of dozens of equally well meant but often crackpot schemes suggesting ways in which the telegraphs could be made faster
or cheaper, or both. Some inventors advocated modifications to the six-panel shutter design that had been adopted in Britain?
others proposed new and improved codebooks; and some called for the whole system to be scrapped and replaced with a completely
new approach. One or two correspondents even claimed to have constructed telegraphs that used electricity.

The earliest suggestion of a scheme for using electricity to send messages had appeared in the
Scots' Magazine
of February 17, 1753. A letter from an unknown author, who signed himself simply "C. M.," was published under the heading
"An Expeditious Method of Conveying Intelli­gence." The letter described a simple signaling system consisting of a wire for
each letter of the alphabet, and a frictional generator that sent shocks down the wires. However, there is no evidence that
C. M. ever actually built such a telegraph, and his identity remains a mystery.

But between the publication of C. M.'s letter and Queen Victoria's accession in 1837, at least sixty experimental electric
telegraphs based on various electric and electrochemical processes are known to have been constructed by a number of researchers.
Different designs used bubbling chemicals, sparks, or the twitching of pith balls to detect tiny electric shocks sent along
wires. Some, like the telegraph described by C. M., involved twenty-six wires (one for each letter of the alphabet), while
others used combinations of a smaller number of wires. But the scientists who constructed them worked independently, and each
had to start from scratch—and, crucially, none of them ever managed to stage a decisive demonstration like the one Chappe
had used to prove the value of his optical system.

In fact, as far as most people were concerned, so little progress appeared to have been made toward the goal of a practical
electric telegraph compared to the highly successful optical design that anyone who expressed an interest in electric telegraphy
was regarded as something of an eccentric. As one satirical verse of 1813 put it:

Our telegraphs, just as they are, let us keep,

They forward good news from afar;

And still may send better—that Boney's asleep

And ended oppression and war.

Electrical telegraphs all must deplore,

Their service would merely be mocking,

Unfit to afford us intelligence more

Than such as would really be shocking.

One example of a working electric telegraph was constructed in 1816 by a twenty-eight-year-old Englishman, Francis Ronalds.
Similar to Chappe's original design, it involved synchronized clocks whose dials were marked with letters, rather like the
dials supposedly used with the sympathetic needles. Instead of hands, each clock had a rotating disk with a notch cut into
it so that only one of the letters on the dial was visible at any time. And instead of the clash of copper pans or the turning
of a black-and-white shutter to signal each letter, Ronalds used electricity. When an electric shock, generated by a frictional
generator, was sent down a wire from the transmitting station, it caused a pair of pith balls suspended from the wire at the
receiving station to become electrically charged; the balls twitched as they briefly repelled one another, and the operator
would write down the letter indicated on the dial at that moment.

Ronalds set up an experimental system in his garden and wrote to the government, requesting an interview with Lord Melville,
the first lord of the Admiralty, to arrange a demonstration. "Why has no serious trial yet been made of the qualifications
of so diligent a courier?" he asked. "And if he should be proved competent to the task, why should not our kings hold councils
at Brighton with their ministers in London? Why should not our government govern at Portsmouth almost as promptly as at Downing
Street? Let us have electric conversazione offices, communicating with each other all over the kingdom, if we can."

However, along with all the other suggestions for ways to improve the telegraphs, Ronalds's farsighted ideas were politely
but firmly rejected. John Barrow, secretary of the Admiralty, wrote back saying that since the war with France had ended,
the telegraph system was in no need of improvement. "Telegraphs of any kind are now wholly unnecessary," he wrote, adding
that "no other than the one now in use will be adopted."

The Admiralty's position was understandable; it could hardly waste its time investigating every quack's claim to have done
the impossible and built a practical electric telegraph. Ronalds never got the chance to demonstrate his invention, but, surprisingly,
he seems to have taken his rejection very well. "Everyone knows," he noted, "that telegraphs have long been great bores at
the Admiralty." He gave up telegraphy and took up weather forecasting instead.