Semaphore Towers

Ask most people when the era of rapid long-distance communication began, and they’ll tell you with the invention of the electric telegraph. That puts the date at 1844, when Samuel F. B. Morse sent the message “What hath God Wrought” from Washington to Baltimore and back. A mere seven years later, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable had been strung in the United States. Fifteen years after that, transcontinental and transatlantic service became viable.

HOWEVER, there was a system of long-distance communication that preceded Morse’s invention. Semaphores, or optical telegraph systems, were built in 18th century France at the behest of Napoleon. Napoleon’s motivation was strictly military. With France frequently surrounded by enemies, Napoleon had to keep track of his own and his opponents’ armies. When the powers-that-be tried to make the system commercially viable, the only proposal that was accepted was transmitting the results of a state-run lottery into the hinterlands. [Go figure.]

The earliest commercial use of semaphores was in harbors. Businesspeople were eager to get the early word on a shipload of tea or mahogany or even firewood. An optical telegraph system was put in place in the Delaware Bay in 1809, giving Philadelphia merchants an advantage when speculating on incoming goods. When merchants financed a system linking Philadelphia to New York City in 1834, it took less than 15 minutes to transmit a short message the 100 hundred miles between the two cities. In 1837, Postmaster Amos Kendall endorsed a project to build semaphore towers from New York to New Orleans. New Orleans money wanted to know what the New York stock market was doing. New York merchants could more reliably speculate on cotton when they knew what a bale was going for as it sat on the dock in New Orleans.

Those semaphore towers were never built. Instead, the electric telegraph swept the nation. It reigned supreme for thirty years or so, until the telephone muscled it aside. My point is that technological innovation has been constant in American history. For those of us who think we live in an age of unprecedented innovation, that is not entirely so. Innovation? For sure. Unprecedented? Not necessarily.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America witnessed the transition from canals to railroads, from ships of sail to steamboats, from water powered factories to those powered by steam engines. Each of these and hundreds of other innovations dramatically affected the daily lives of average people.

Semaphore towers play a pivotal role in Book 2 of Rian Krieger’s Journey, The Blackmailer.