31. See, e.g., van Creveld, Technology in War, 86, 96, 106, and generally “The Age of Machines, 1500–1830,” 81–149.
32. For extensive discussion and documentation of the earliest means of signaling, see Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995), 1–29, 43–44; condensed pdf available at people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/papers/Early_History_of_Data_Networks/The_Early_History_of_Data_Networks.html (accessed Apr. 16, 2017); Alexander J. Field, “French Optical Telegraphy, 1793–1855: Hardware, Software, Administration,” Technology and Culture 35:2 (Apr. 1994), passim; George B. Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1997), 131–39. Jamie Morton, The Role of the Physical Environment in Ancient Greek Seafaring (Leiden: Brill, 2001), discusses beacons and fires, including the legend, repeated by Euripides, that Nauplius, king of Euboea, intentionally set misleading beacon fires on a dangerous, rocky promontory so as to cause the wrecking of the Greek fleet returning from Troy, because the fires would be interpreted by the Greeks as the lights of a safe harbor (210–12). Polybius, Histories, 10.45.5, 10.43.2.
33. Holzmann and Pehrson, Early Data Networks, 35–38; Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines, chap. 8, “On Distributed Communications,” 133–34, 137–38; Field, “French Optical Telegraphy,” 332.
34. The root of “tachygraph” (French tachygraphe) is the Greek tachys, meaning “swift”—also found in “tachometer” (an instrument for measuring the velocity of a machine) as well as “tachyon” (a hypothetical faster-than-light particle).
35. Quoted in Holzmann and Pehrson, Early Data Networks, 56–57.
36. See detailed technical descriptions in, e.g., Field, “French Optical Telegraphy,” 320–22, 331–38; figs. 1–2, pp. 334–35. Field likens the Chappes’ system to American Sign Language—“Sign language is, in a sense, optical telegraphy over short distances, with hand, arm, and finger signals the analogue to the positions of the Chappe apparatus. Both systems use a large and complex transmission set, since both can rely on the acuity of visual recognition; both are constrained by the time required to compose individual signals”—and points out that ASL “is in fact an offshoot of, and linguistically similar to, a code originally developed in France in the 18th century” (329).
37. Andy Martin, “Mentioned in Dispatches: Napoleon, Chappe and Chateaubriand,” Modern & Contemporary France 8:4 (2000), 446–47; van Creveld, Command in War, 60.
38. In French, the complete transcription reads:
Le Directeur de la Correspondance Télégraphique de Strasbourg au Citoyen Commissaire du pouvoir exécutif près l’administration municipale de Strasbourg.
Transmission télégraphique de Paris à Strasbourg le 21 Brumaire.
Le corps législatif est transporté à St. Cloud. Bonaparte est nommé Commandant de Paris. Tout est tranquille et content.
Le Directoire a donné sa démission. Moreau, général, commande au palais du Directoire.
Pour copie, Durant
We are grateful to Maryline Simler of the Société d’Histoire de la Poste et de France Telecom en Alsace for providing us with the text of the original communication. For a photo of the transcribed telegram, written on the custom letterhead of the time, see musee.ptt.alsace.pagesperso-orange.fr/page%20tour.htm (accessed Oct. 7, 2017).
39. Aeneid, 1.278–79.
40. US military historians take the position that the United States was the first country to have a signal corps, though perhaps the dedicated operators of the Chappe telegraph should collectively be considered a close forerunner. Not until Feb. 1863 did Congress vote to establish the Union signalers as a separate corps. But the training of the men who became the US Signal Corps had begun in June 1861, and later that year Congress authorized $21,000 for their activities. The Confederate Congress voted to authorize such a corps in Apr. 1862. Rebecca Robbins Raines, Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the U.S. Army Signal Corps (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, US Army, 1996), 3, 8–12, 29; Paul J. Scheips, “Union Signal Communications: Innovation and Conflict,” Civil War History 9:4 (Dec. 1963), 402–403.
41. Raines, Getting the Message Through, 8, 23–24, 29; Scheips, “Union Signal Communications,” 401–402; George Raynor Thompson, “Civil War Signals,” Military Affairs 18:4 (Winter 1954), 189–90; Edwin C. Fishel, The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 38ff. Fishel quotes Alexander’s account many years later: “I was watching the flag of our station at Stone Bridge [where the Warrenton Turnpike crosses over Bull Run] when in the distant edge of the field of view of my glass, a gleam caught my eye. It was the reflection of the sun (which was low in the east behind me), from a polished brass field piece.” He immediately signaled to the nearby commanders, and Fishel contends that “the two commanders’ action in response to the enemy advance was more timely than it could have been in the absence of the signal service. It would be too much to say that Alexander’s intelligence won the Bull Run battle, but it certainly helped the Confederates from losing it. For that they had to thank an inventive young Yankee physician” (39–40).
42. In Secret War, Fishel argues that the immobility of the European “networks of semaphore towers . . . made them virtually useless by a marching and fighting army” (37–38).
43. Although Myer had (temporarily, as it turned out) lost his post in November 1863, he remained deeply preoccupied with the well-being and development of the Signal Corps, which was, after all, his creation. He had begun A Manual of Signals for the Use of Signal Officers in the Field prior to his dismissal, and a sympathetic clerk in the Washington headquarters of the Signal Corps arranged for its printing. The title page does not mention Myer; instead it says, “Published by Order of the War Department / Washington: Government Printing Office.” The next, enlarged edition, published in 1868 by D. Van Nostrand, has a lengthier title and lists Bvt. Brig. Genl. Albert J. Myer as author. Scheips, “Union Signal Communications,” 413–14.
44. Initially, leftward meant “1” and rightward meant “2”; later the reverse became standard. In some accounts, therefore, “A” is listed as “2-2” and “B” as “2-1-1-2.” See Major General A. W. Greely, “The Signal Corps,” in Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes, vol. 8, ed. Francis Trevelyan Miller and Robert Sampson Lanier (New York: Review of Reviews, 1912), 312–40. Alphabet, numerals, and code signals listed on pp. 314 and 316.
45. Fishel, Secret War, 4; Albert J. Myer, A Manual of Signals: For the Use of Signal Officers in the Field, and for Military and Naval Students, Military Schools, etc. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1868), 231.
46. Myer, Manual of Signals, 232.
47. In the fall of 1863, Myer’s “cipher disk”—a device for selecting preset variations on the regular code—came into general use; there is some evidence that the Confederate side was henceforth unable to read Union signals but that the Union side continued to be able to read the Confederates’. Scheips, “Union Signal Communications,” 407 n. 32. Re casualties, the Union corps had a ratio of killed to wounded of 150 percent, and one Medal of Honor. Major General Greely, in “The Signal Corps,” writes, “Did a non-combatant corps ever before suffer such disproportionate casualties—killed, wounded, and captured? Sense of duty, necessity of exposure to fire, and importance of mission were conditions incompatible with personal safety—and the Signal Corps paid the price. While many found their fate in Confederate prisons, the extreme danger of signal work, when conjoined with stubborn adherence to outposts of duty, is forcefully evidenced by the fact that the killed of the Signal Corps were one hundred and fifty per cent. of the wounded, as against the usual ratio of twenty per cent” (318). See also Raines, Getting the Message Through, 29.
48. For discussions of some of the battles as experienced by the Signal Corps, see, e.g., Greely, “The Signal Corps”; Thompson, “Civil War Sign
als”; Raines, Getting the Message Through, 23–28. Battles whose outcomes are considered to have been shaped in part by signalers include Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Allatoona, as well as Gettysburg.
49. For accounts of signaling at Gettysburg, see, e.g., J. Willard Brown, The Signal Corps, U.S.A. in the War of the Rebellion (Boston: US Veteran Signal Corps Association, 1896), 359–72; Alexander W. Cameron, “The Signal Corps at Gettysburg,” Gettysburg 3 (July 1990), 9–15; Raines, Getting the Message Through, 25–27; Thompson, “Civil War Signals,” 197–98. General Lee’s post-encounter report included the statement “The advance of the enemy to [Gettysburg] was unknown” (Fishel, Secret War, 522).
50. Official Records XXVII, Part III, 488, cited in, e.g., Raines, Getting the Message Through, 25.
51. This was one of several messages sent in quick succession, quoted in Brown, Signal Corps, U.S.A., 360–61.
52. Quoted in Brown, Signal Corps, U.S.A., 367–68.
53. Report by Capt. E. C. Pierce, quoted in Brown, Signal Corps, U.S.A., 361–62. The July 3 entry in the diary of one of Pierce’s flagmen, Sergeant Luther C. Furst, concurs in vivid detail: “Were up before daylight. Began to signal in direction of Gettysburg at daybreak. Held our station all day, but were much annoyed by the enemy’s sharpshooters in and near the Devil’s Den. Have to keep under cover to protect ourselves. The large rocks piled up all around us serve as good protection. Today there have been seven men killed and wounded near our station by the enemy’s sharpshooters; hundreds on all sides of us by the enemy’s severe cannonading. Up to near noon there has been considerable skirmishing along line. A little later the whole of the artillery on both sides opened up and shell flew fast and thick. A good many have been struck near our station, but we are able to keep up communication. The fight upon the right is said to have been very severe, but our troops have held their positions and repulsed the enemy at every point.” Quoted in Brown, Signal Corps, U.S.A., 362–64.
54. Report by L. B. Norton, chief signal officer, Army of the Potomac, quoted in Brown, Signal Corps, U.S.A., 372.
55. Raines, Getting the Message Through, 45–47, 53–54.
56. Raines, Getting the Message Through, 131, 145, chap. 5 passim. In the Signal Corps’s 1914 annual report, the chief signal officer, while expressing uncertainty and fear about the dropping of bombs by aircraft, predicted that “if the future shows that attack from the sky is effective and terrible, as may prove to be the case, it is evident that, like the rain, it must fall upon the just and upon the unjust, and it may be supposed will therefore become taboo to all civilized people; and forbidden at least by paper agreements.”
57. Joseph W. Slade, “Review: Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the U.S. Army Signal Corps,” Technology and Culture 39:3 (July 1998), 592.
58. Raines, Getting the Message Through, 169–70, 190, chap. 5.
59. For the beginnings, see, e.g., Hugh Barty-King, Eyes Right: The Story of Dollond & Aitchison Opticians, 1750–1985 (London: Quiller Press, 1986), 15–53.
60. Barty-King, Eyes Right, 34.
61. Barty-King, Eyes Right, 53.
62. Warner, Alvan Clark & Sons, 99: “[Between 1863 and 1865] the Clarks sold the Navy at least 165 spyglasses at prices ranging from $25.75 to $35.00 apiece.” Using 1863 dollars (the Civil War resulted in a significant lowering of prices by 1865), that would be about $500 to $700 in 2016 dollars, based on purchasing power as tracked by the Consumer Price Index. Calculator at Measuring Worth, www.measuringworth.com (accessed Jan. 16, 2018).
63. An acquaintance who had seen Clark in 1885 mentioned that the optician’s thumbs had burst open from his having used them as polishers. Warner, Alvan Clark & Sons, 27.
64. Heber D. Curtis, “Optical Glass,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (Apr. 1919), 77, archive.org/stream/publicationsast30pacigoog/publicationsast30pacigoog_djvu.txt (accessed Apr. 17, 2017).
65. Fuel usage alone presents a daunting challenge. In the US during World War I, for instance, “the question of fuel and gas for the glass-melting furnaces and for other operations became serious during the coal shortage of the winter 1917–18. When it is realized that the glass plant at the Bausch & Lomb factory alone consumed 33,000,000 cubic feet of illuminating gas per month, a quantity sufficient to meet the needs of a city of 80,000 inhabitants, the scale of its fuel consumption and of the difficulty of meeting the situation adequately is apparent.” US Army Ordnance Department/Lt. Col. F. E. Wright, The Manufacture of Optical Glass and of Optical Systems: A Wartime Problem (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 288, archive.org/details/manufactureofopt00unitrich (accessed Apr. 17, 2017). For a clear explanation of the process, see Curtis, “Optical Glass,” 77–85.
66. In about 1820, for instance, a London instrument maker paid eight guineas for “a rude piece of flint glass about five inches in diameter” (Fred Watson, Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope [Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2005], 183–85). A guinea being one pound and one shilling, eight guineas would have a 2016 purchasing power of more than £600, based on the retail price index (www.measuringworth.com)—about US$1,000. But window glass, too, was an expensive item, and Britain imposed a “deeply unpopular” window tax from 1696 through 1851; see “About Parliament: Living Heritage: Window Tax,” www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/towns/tyne-and-wear-case-study/about-the-group/housing/window-tax/ (accessed Apr. 17, 2017). In the US soon after the Civil War, coal fields along with natural gas were developed, and glass manufacture took place in exactly those areas: Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia.
67. Zeiss unveiled the first optical planetarium projector in 1923; New York’s Hayden Planetarium has had a Zeiss “projection planetarium” (Zeiss’s own term) ever since its founding in 1935.
68. Antje Hagen, “Export versus Direct Investment in the German Optical Industry: Carl Zeiss, Jena and Glaswerk Schott & Gen. in the UK, from Their Beginnings to 1933,” Business History 38:4 (1996), 4, 17 n. 23. During the Boer War, Zeiss supplied the British army with binoculars; during the Russo-Japanese War, it supplied both sides with them.
69. Zeiss, “The Carl Zeiss Foundation in Jena, 1885–1945: Expansion of the Product Portfolio,” www.zeiss.com/corporate/int/history/company-history/at-a-glance.html#inpagetabs-1 (accessed Apr. 18, 2017).
70. Zeiss, “History of Zeiss in Oberkochen,” www.zeiss.com/corporate/int/history/locations/oberkochen.html; Zeiss, “Background Story: The Development of Carl Zeiss Between 1945 and 1989,” www.zeiss.com/corporate/int/history/company-history/20-years-of-reunification/background-story.html; Zeiss, “Lens in a Square—The Zeiss Logo,” www.zeiss.com/corporate/int/history/company-history/the-zeiss-logo.html (accessed Nov. 15, 2017).
71. William Tobin, “Evolution of the Foucault–Secretan Reflecting Telescope,” J. Astronomical History and Heritage 19:2 (2016), 106–84, available at SAO/NASA ADS Astronomy Abstract Service, adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016JAHH...19..106T (accessed Oct. 19, 2017).
72. Stephen C. Sambrook, “The British Armed Forces and Their Acquisition of Optical Technology: Commitment and Reluctance, 1888–1914,” in Year Book of European Administrative History 20 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2008), 2.
73. US Army Ordnance Department, Manufacture of Optical Glass, chaps. 1, 7.
74. Curtis, “Optical Glass,” 77; Stephen C. Sambrook, “No Gunnery Without Glass: Optical Glass Supply and Production Problems in Britain and the USA, 1914–1918” (working paper, Sept. 2000), n.p., home.europa.com/~telscope/glass-ss.txt; Stewart Wills, “How the Great War Changed the Optics Industry,” Optics & Photonics News 27 (Jan. 2016), www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/january_2016/features/how_the_great_war_changed_the_optics_industry/ (accessed Apr. 18, 2017).
75. As described by Sambrook, although Britain and the US had a heavy reliance on Schott, the exact nature of that reliance, both prior to and during World War I, is complex: “Sometimes, perhaps many times, it was as muc
h the result of Schott’s ‘publicity’ and growing reputation as the ‘ne plus ultra’ in glass manufacture, as a real need to use Schott glass. Many of the ‘new Jena glasses’ introduced in the 1890s were duplicated by Parra Mantois and to a lesser degree by Chance prior to 1914. The problems of dependency which arose in Britain after 1914 were usually caused by a maker having previously designed an optical system which incorporated (say) one single element using a Schott glass which wasn’t replicated by another maker. Solving that problem meant either copying the Schott glass or re-designing the rest of the system around whatever glass WAS available” (Sambrook, email to Avis Lang, Dec. 6, 2009).
76. Hagen, “Export versus Direct Investment,” 11.
77. One such warning is found in NAK ADM 116/3458, Aug. 27, 1915, Admiralty (ADM) Report on the state of glass supplies, which describes a meeting on July 13, 1912, between Richard Glazebrook, director of the National Physical Laboratory, the Third Sea Lord, and the Director of Naval Ordnance. A “leading optician” had written to Glazebrook in 1911, saying that Schott glasses were widely used in optical instruments supplied by British makers to the Admiralty and that “[i]n the event of a war with Germany . . . a stoppage of optical glass would simply paralyse the optical trade.” A year later, Glazebrook consulted “seven or eight leading opticians” who considered that it was “essential” to use German glasses in “most” of the Admiralty’s instruments and that both British and French glass was “unreliable” in transparency and homogeneity. It is possible that the opticians were overstating the case and angling for greater government support, but the warning was taken seriously enough to result in the formation of a committee to articulate domestic research requirements (Sambrook, email to Avis Lang, Dec. 7, 2009).
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