Sending urgent messages by means of a moving relay, whether of runners or mounted couriers, is a time-honored way to communicate at a distance. Twenty-five centuries ago, for instance, Darius the Great set up a relay of men whose shouts could carry great distances. A vast array of other visual and acoustic tricks can transcend time and space: bonfires, smoke, and torches; flags, mirrors, and polished shields; trumpets, drums, animal horns, and seashells. Using extremely simple, prearranged visual codes, especially torch codes, for the most common wartime contingencies dates back some twenty-five centuries as well. As the second-century BC Greek historian Polybius writes in The Histories, “It is evident to all that in every matter, and especially in warfare, the power of acting at the right time contributes very much to the success of enterprises, and fire-signals are the most efficient of all the devices which aid us to do this.” Trouble is, he notes,
it is impossible to agree beforehand about things of which one cannot be aware before they happen. And this is the vital matter; for how can anyone consider how to render assistance if he does not know how many of the enemy have arrived, or where? And how can anyone be of good cheer or the reverse, or in fact think of anything at all, if he does not understand how many ships or how much corn has arrived from the allies?32
Clearly the next step, says Polybius, is to develop a far more powerful, flexible visual code that could capture the gist of an important message. To the great thinkers of his era, the obvious choice was a code based on the alphabet, though still conveyed via torches. And how best to view the distant signal fires? Through the still-empty sighting tubes of the time.
Two thousand years later, and less than a century after those tubes began to be occupied by lenses, John Wilkins—soon to become master of Trinity College, Cambridge—published a treatise titled Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger. Shewing, How a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any distance (1641). In it, he describes a form of coding, and how coded messages could be cleverly encrypted and conveyed via torch signals. Less than half a century later, in a 1684 lecture to the Royal Society titled “Shewing a way how to communicate one’s Mind at great distances,” the brilliant Robert Hooke proposed a marriage between the ancients’ optical telegraph, the modern telescope, and the changeable billboard.
Hooke outlined a system with multiple stations, each equipped with a telescope and each located in a high, isolated spot, well above the obscuring fog of a typical British morning, “to convey Intelligence from any one high and eminent Place, to any other that lies in Sight of it, tho’ 30 or 40 Miles distant, in as short a Time almost, as a Man can write what he would have sent.” He even mentioned “Cruptography.” Along with what would now be called control codes, the system would use twenty-four large symbols made of lightweight wood, hoisted in quick succession via pulley to the top of a high pole.33
In the waning years of the eighteenth century, in part spurred by the image quality attainable through the newest telescopes, a number of inventors experimented with long-distance communication. They tried synchronization by banging on pots or by flipping from large black surfaces to white ones. They tried smoke, fire, pendulums, shutters, windmills, synchronized clocks, and sliding panels. Among those inventors were the five brothers Chappe, descendants of a French baron and, as of late 1789, unemployed because of the Revolution.
On March 24, 1792, Claude Chappe, priest and physics buff, and the most committed and persistent of the brothers, addressed the French legislature in a bid to gain government support for an official demonstration of their optical telegraph, the tachygraphe:34
I have come to offer to the National Assembly the tribute of a discovery that I believe to be useful to the public cause. . . . I can, in twenty minutes, transmit over a distance of eight to ten miles, the following, or any other similar phrase: “Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city. Bender is advancing for its defense. The two generals are present. Tomorrow the battle will start.” These same phrases are communicated in twenty-four minutes over a distance twice that of before; in thirty-three minutes they cover fifty miles.35
While the proposal languished in a series of committees, France was declared a republic, Louis XVI was beheaded, the republic declared war against its monarchist neighbors, and Chappe’s experiments were twice destroyed by citizens suspicious that the apparatus would be used to get in touch with enemies of the state. Finally, success. On July 12, 1793 (a day before the radical doctor-journalist Jean-Paul Marat, vocal proponent of the guillotine, was stabbed to death in his bathtub), Claude Chappe, in the presence of members of the legislature, issued a two-sentence message from a tower near Paris. Eleven minutes later, one of his brothers received it—that is to say, saw it through his telescope—at a tower sixteen miles away. Chappe had handily bested the time and distance of his own original estimate. On July 26 (a day before the radical lawyer-philosopher Robespierre was elected to the powerful Committee of Public Safety), Chappe was given military rank and the title of telegraph engineer. On August 4 the Committee of Public Safety ordered that construction begin on a two-hundred-kilometer telegraph line between Paris and the northern city of Lille. The project was placed under the authority of the minister of war.
There were to be eighteen high towers in all. The coded message would be carried atop a pole by one long, movable bar and two smaller, hinged bars attached at either end—three lines that could be swiftly manipulated from below by wires, pulleys, and rods. Of the ninety-eight signals that could be configured by the three bars, six were reserved for special instructions. The remaining ninety-two conveyed the message through a pair of signals. The first one directed the telescope operator to the page number in the accompanying codebook, in which each page listed ninety-two words or phrases. The second signal directed the operator to the item number on the page. All told, a compendium of almost 8,500 message bits.36
Enthusiasm ran rampant. The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the telegraph as a bringer of peace: “The capitals of distant nations might be united by chains of [telegraph] posts and the settling of those disputes which at present take up years or months might then be accomplished in as many hours.” Napoleon himself embraced the optical telegraph with both arms. Here was a man who wanted everything to be done yesterday and wanted to be everywhere at once. Via the royal mail service, he reckoned, information could move only about twice as fast as it had in Julius Caesar’s time; as one historian of France puts it, “the fastest communication could be no faster than a mounted rider or a sail before the wind.”37 Not only was that much too slow by Napoleon’s standards, but, owing to mail seizures by the likes of Admiral Nelson, sending a letter was no guarantee of its arrival. The optical telegraph, on the other hand, promised both instantaneity and lack of interference.
One news flash that had to be disseminated as swiftly and widely as possible was the coup d’état that began on 18 Brumaire of the French Republic’s year VIII (November 9, 1799). An official copy of the dispatch, in flowing script on official letterhead, survives. “Bonaparte is named Commandant of Paris,” it declares. “All is calm and happy.”38 The letterhead itself is worth a good look. Kneeling at the base of a towering stone pyramid topped by the Chappe signal bars is the messenger god Mercury, about to finish engraving on the pyramid a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: “HIS EGO NEC METAS RERUM NEC TEMPORA PONO.” Add the next few words of the famous quotation (the words of Jupiter, king of the gods), and it sums up the aims of both Chappe and Napoleon: “For them I set no boundaries of things or time; I give empire without end.”39
The optical telegraph has been called the first practical telecommunications system, the first nationwide data network, the first internet. Claude Chappe himself has been called the first telecom mogul. By the late 1700s, however, electricity had become the darling of experimenters—fueled in part by Benjamin Franklin’s internationally read 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity—and by the 1830s inventors had begun t
o experiment with the electric telegraph. Wasting no time, in the 1840s France began to replace its optical system with an electric one. In early September 1855, during the Crimean War, news of the fall of Sevastopol arrived via the Chappe telegraph; shortly afterward, the network fell silent.
But the idea of an optical system was not yet dead. You could still use one to overlook the battlefield, monitor the enemy’s approach, or evade enemy forces under close conditions—if and only if your system was low-tech and portable, the signaler was in the receiver’s line of sight, the signals weren’t swallowed by the smoke of battle, the weather cooperated, and your enemy didn’t have a similar system or couldn’t decipher the sender’s code. That list of qualifiers may sound impossibly long, but on a few occasions during the American Civil War all or most of them were fulfilled. These were the occasions when Signal Corps officers, standing guard and observing through their telescopes, together with the flagmen who communicated the officers’ warnings and requests, influenced the course of battle.
By 1862, America had three separate entities responsible for military communications: one organized by a US Army surgeon named Albert J. Myer, the second organized by a West Point graduate named Edward Porter Alexander, and the third a wartime expedient called the United States Military Telegraph, which relied primarily on professional civilian operators and on the electric telegraph lines owned by private companies.40 The result was turf battles, conflicting loyalties, mistrust, and espionage.
Myer, a Northerner, was the right person at the right time. Having worked at the New York State Telegraph Company, he was familiar with the new, electric technology as well as the basic concepts of coding. He’d already adapted a popular telegraph code for use as a sign language: spelling out words letter by letter, in a binary code, by tapping on a nearby surface. Upon joining the Army, he readapted the code so that each letter could be communicated with a single flag by a single signaler and seen by a distant observer peering through a telescope.
In 1856 Myer pitched his system to the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who did not pursue it. A few years later, a new secretary of war, along with a committee headed by another Southerner, Robert E. Lee of Virginia, gave Myer the go-ahead to borrow some personnel and run some tests. The most assiduous of the borrowed assistants was a third Southerner, the Georgia-born second lieutenant Edward Porter Alexander. The tests went better than expected, and in the spring of 1860 Congress made Myer the first-ever US Army signal officer.
Deployed to New Mexico in late 1860 to help stamp out Navajo resistance to westward expansion onto Native lands, Myer and his signalers did both reconnaissance and communication. It would not be the first time that technological innovations would help displace a resident population.
Soon came secession and civil war. In February 1861, Jefferson Davis became provisional president of the newborn Confederate States of America. In April Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter. Myer was ordered east in May; in June he began training Union signal officers and flagmen. In July, during the First Battle of Bull Run—while Myer and twenty members of the 26th Pennsylvania Infantry were tangled up in a tree with a reconnaissance balloon—Myer’s former collaborator Edward Alexander, now a captain in the Confederate Army, made brilliant use of his own telescope and of Myer’s code to warn his side of the approaching Union troops.41 In August, Myer became chief signal officer of the Army of the Potomac. Less than a year later the Confederate congress voted to create a full-fledged signal corps; a year after that, the Federal congress voted to do the same.
Myer’s system was both simpler and slower than the Chappes’. More important, because it was thoroughly portable, it could be used for communications to and from the battlefield.42 It was also affordable and flexible. But all parties to a communication had to be on the same page. They needed a common textbook, and in early 1864 Myer published the first of his many editions. The text leaves little to guesswork: it even tells the reader to hold binoculars with two hands when looking through them.43
The signaler, called a wigwagger, positions himself on a hilltop, tower, isolated tree, ship’s masthead, or anywhere else that commands a good view. Holding a large flag attached to a pole, he starts off with his arms in a vertical position. He briskly sweeps the flag down to the right to signal “1,” returns it to the vertical, and sweeps down to the left to signal “2.” Four swoops at most take care of the entire alphabet. A single forward swoop signals the end of a word, two the end of a sentence, three the end of a message.44 A choice of flags—white, red, and black, each with a contrasting center—makes the motions visible during the day in any environment.
The lookout was the signaler’s superior. He carried the optical aids and assessed the circumstances, using binoculars for reading signals less than five miles away and a portable telescope for greater distances. To avoid detection, standard Signal Corps collapsible telescopes were camouflaged: Myer describes the four-jointed draw as “bronzed black, in order that there may be neither glitter to attract the enemy, nor glare to disturb the eye of the observer.”45 Sometimes one officer acted as both signaler and lookout. Sometimes the optical aid minus the flags provided the main advantage: observing while unobserved. At well-concealed signal stations, the lookouts sometimes tracked enemy movements with their telescopes while the flagmen raised nary a flag, because wigwagging would announce the station’s position—and that would be the end of the advantage.
Myer makes absolutely clear that the telescope is a precious thing:
Telescopes ought never to be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy. Officers, on dangerous stations, should conceal their glasses when not in use. When a glass is to be hidden for precaution, the object-lens, or one joint of the telescope, should be hidden separately from the body of the telescope. A single joint or one lens is so small an object, that it can be concealed almost beyond the possibility of discovery. If an officer is in danger of capture, and there are no means of concealment, the telescope-glasses must be shattered or rendered worthless rather than surrendered.46
Both North and South used the same basic binary signaling system. As a result, both sides could read at least some of the other side’s messages, even when the codes were re-enciphered. Signal duty brought much criticism, few medals, and a disproportionate chance of death.47 Yet signalers and encipherers on both sides showed remarkable ingenuity and steadfastness, and certain battles might have gone differently were it not for the officers perched in trees, cupolas, and the hundred-foot towers built expressly to give them the high ground.48
Consider Gettysburg, the southern Pennsylvania battleground where some fifty thousand soldiers lost their lives in the first three days of July 1863. By the last week of June, a dozen signal officers were installed near the Maryland–Pennsylvania border, watching for the advance of the Army of Northern Virginia. By the morning of June 30 it was evident to the Northerners that the Confederate columns—nearly the whole of Lee’s army—were converging on Gettysburg. The Southern generals did not expect to be met by a massive Union force.49
On July 1, as he moved from steeple to cupola in Gettysburg, a Union signal officer named Aaron B. Jerome alerted his commanding general that he had detected the rebels close by. Short of men, the commander could muster only two brigades along the road to intercept them. Within hours, Jerome signaled details of the Confederates’ progress to a colleague on a nearby hill: “Over a division of the rebels is making a flank movement on our right; the line extends over a mile, and is advancing, skirmishing. There is nothing but cavalry to oppose them.”50
That day, the Confederates took Gettysburg. However, Union signalers managed to reach Little Round Top, a now-famous hill alternately occupied and abandoned by Union troops during the next two days. By noon on July 2, Lieutenant Jerome, again in the thick of things, sent this message from Little Round Top to headquarters: “The rebels are in force, and our skirmishers give way. One mile west of Round Top signal station, the woods are full of
them.”51 Numerous though they were, the Confederate forces were constrained by having to avoid being seen by Union signalers. Eventually, despite heavy fire, Union forces took Little Round Top. As Myer’s erstwhile protégé Edward Alexander, by now a brigadier general who served as the rebels’ artillery commander at Gettysburg, later complained, “That wretched little signal station upon Round Top that day caused one of our divisions to lose over two hours and probably delayed our assault nearly that long.”52
On July 3, intense Confederate fire from the foot of the exposed hill made it impossible for Union wigwaggers to use their flags, so they sent out their orderlies on horseback every few minutes to deliver messages to headquarters.53 Signalers at other stations around Gettysburg showed their determination in other ways. One captain stationed near Cemetery Hill stayed behind after all the other Union officers and troops had been forced away, taking the signal equipment with them. Undeterred, under fire, and needing to send a few important messages, he quickly cut himself a pole and attached a bedsheet to it to serve as the flag.54
The next morning, the Confederates began to withdraw, their mission undermined in part by the wigwaggers’ resourcefulness.
Communication had long been a weak link in the structure of command. Myer and his signalers helped change that—for a while. Generals didn’t stop using scouts and spies and couriers. Nor did they stop looking through their own telescopes to get firsthand information. The rapidly improving electric telegraph soon erased the need for the optical telegraph. But credit should be given where credit is due. In melding the historical practices of enciphering and aerial signaling with the rapidly improving craft of telescope manufacture, Myer’s simple method linked widely dispersed as well as vulnerably close commanders and troops, enabling not just the rapid exchange of information but also rapid intervention.
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