Early telecommunications[edit]
Main articles: Beacon and Optical telegraphy
Early telecommunications included smoke signals and drums. Talking drums were used by natives in Africa, New Guinea and South America, and smoke signals in North Americaand China. Contrary to what one might think, these systems were often used to do more than merely announce the presence of a military camp.[1][2]
In 1792, a French engineer, Claude Chappe built the first visual telegraphy (or semaphore) system between Lille and Paris. This was followed by a line from Strasbourg to Paris. In 1794, a Swedish engineer, Abraham Edelcrantz built a quite different system from Stockholm to Drottningholm. As opposed to Chappe's system which involved pulleys rotating beams of wood, Edelcrantz's system relied only upon shutters and was therefore faster.[3] However semaphore as a communication system suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers often at intervals of only ten to thirty kilometres (six to nineteen miles). As a result, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.[4]
Telegraph and telephone[edit]
Main articles: Electrical telegraph, Transatlantic telegraph cable, Invention of the telephone, and History of the telephone
Stock telegraph ticker machine byThomas Edison
A very early experiment in electrical telegraphy was an 'electrochemical' telegraph created by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring in 1809, based