Signal Change (Thresholds Journal)
Published in Thresholds Journal 50: Before // After
“I stand on the bank of a river; on the opposite bank is a ferryman with a boat. The river separates us, presenting as it does a formidable material obstacle to my passage. Requiring to cross, I shout to the man to come over to pick me up. A pressure wave ripples through the air and reaches the ferryman’s ears: he hears my shout. Only then, at the point when I throw a line of communication across the gap, does the river come to lie between myself and the ferryman. For in this communication, the river becomes a matter of common concern to both of us, an inter-est.”
Tim Ingold
It is common for surveys of the history of telecommunication to transition from the efforts of disparate ancient cultures (including those of Greece, China, and Sri Lanka) to transmit messages across distances using rudimentary optical and audial telegraphic systems, such as smoke and drum signals, to Samuel Morse’s struggle to patent the electrical telegraph in 1836 as it opened up a pathway for subsequent innovations (such as the telephone, the television, and the internet), and elaborate relatively little on the developments in between.
The focus of this essay is therefore on what is perhaps the most significant advancement in telecommunication technology, yet so often minimized as a passing novelty, during this millennia-long period—the optical telegraph, from which the word “telegraph” originates, as well as the optical telegraph system, then-known as the Telegraph Administration, as invented by the French engineer Claude Chappe—as well as its architectural and infrastructural significance to the nation of France during its inception and development from the late 18th to the mid 19th century.
While it is well known that this era is a uniquely turbulent one in the social, infrastructural, and political history of France—as it shifted from the feudalist system of the Ancien Régime to the various constitutional incarnations of the Revolution and finally to the rise and fall of Napoleon in his tireless pursuit of Parisian centralization—the optical telegraph, as both a physical entity as well as the lines-of-sight required for its proper function within an optical network, has been relatively under examined as a subject of public skepticism that later became an agent of spatio-temporal change for the nation during this formative period.
To comprehend the depth of its involvement in the unique conditions of Paris’ many transitions during these few decades, as well as those of France as it strove for unification, it is necessary to contrast the optical telegraph with the fate of a pre-existing structure with an opposingly spatial set of conditions: the Farmers-General Wall.
------
In the final years of the Ancien Régime, a corporation of tax farmers, known as the Ferme Générale (Farmers General), represented a wealthy class of citizens headquartered in Paris that was apparently never satisfied with their successes in transferring profits of the peasant classes into their own few pockets. Seeking a reliable means of securing taxes through long-term risk management, the members of the Ferme Générale conceived of a permanent structure around the perimeter of the city.
Predictably, the barrières were as popular with the Ferme Générale and its beneficiaries as they were unpopular among the remaining citizenry, who only stood to suffer from its presence. One treatise independently published and distributed in 1787 by the Parisian writer Jacques-Antoine Dulaure lamented that the wall “harms the health of the air,” and concluded, as Vidler writes, “that the city, already in a basin surrounded by hills, would be deprived of some 45,000 cubic toises of air each second by this enceinte, amounting to 1,620,000 cubic feet each minute.” The financial and physical health of ordinary Parisians, in other words, was threatened by the Farmers-General wall in its restriction of public access to both land and air, rendering it an architectural and infrastructural symbol of the monarchy’s oppression of the increasingly intolerant peasant class.
Construction essentially came to a standstill in April 1787 following the exile of Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the Controller-General of Finances. After two years of searching for the necessary funds to resume construction, 46 of the completed 55 barrières were systematically vandalized and burned for a five day period beginning on July 10, 1789, making them among the first victims of revolt during the Revolution, four days before the more famous storming of the bastille on the 14th—no doubt a reflection that the barrières, too, bore the elements of a prison. Despite subsequent attempts to reinstate their authority in 1790, during which time the Ferme enlisted some 600 guards for the overall structure’s protection, a year’s worth of further attacks pressured the Ferme to suspend taxation on May 1st, 1791.------
In that same year, the young inventor Claude Chappe and his brothers had independently completed their first iteration of a telecommunication system: two modified pendulum clocks placed 16 kilometers away from one another across the hills and valleys of France, designed to be seen from either end with handheld telescopes aimed across the landscape.
The brothers Chappe held their first public demonstration on March 2nd, 1791, by placing one device on the terrace of a home in the commune of Brûlon (Chappe’s hometown) and the other in the window of a home roughly 16 kilometers away in the commune of Parcé. Based on its success as witnessed by invited officials, the Chappe brothers were eager to present it to the recently established National Legislative Assembly later that year as a potential tool for the new republic.
Chappe began by requesting the Assembly’s permission to install an optical telegraph on top of the Barrière de l'Étoile in Paris, one of the last remaining elements designed by Ledoux for the Farmers-General Wall. There is little written on the reasoning behind this decision, but it can be interpreted, in part, as an effort to gain the favor of the Legislative Assembly by transforming an oppressive remnant of the former regime into one that suited the need for openness in the new one; signaling the city’s reopening as the communication center of a fractured nation on the path toward centralization.
If the barrières symbolized the spatial repression of Parisians during the Ancien Régime, Chappe’s optical telegraphs—nodes without any blockades whatsoever between them—had the capacity to become symbols of their liberty. As Paris grew in the following decade, “communications within the city became as important as communications between Paris and the rest of the country,” writes Josef W. Konvitz.
Though he did receive permission to erect a telegraph atop the Barrière de l'Étoile, his construction materials were stolen from the site—the first of many efforts by the public to sabotage Chappe’s efforts, as will be detailed later on—and, without any additionally provided funds, he waited until March 22nd, 1792, to submit a new proposal with the assistance of his brother Ignace, who had been elected as a deputy to the Assembly the previous October.
The speed of the transmission, roughly 52 miles per hour, was only a bit of an improvement on that of a galloping horse. This iteration of the optical telegraph failed to receive funding—likely a combination of both its relatively unimpressive speed as well as the Assembly’s preoccupation with its eventual seizure by the National Convention.
As he waited for his next opportunity to address the powers that be, Chappe improved upon his design to improve the speed of transmission through an updated design. Using a rectangular wooden frame with five sliding panels that yielded 32 possible combinations, Chappe moved his experiment from the Barrière de l'Étoile to a park in Ménilmontant. It was at this site, however, that Chappe received an even uglier welcome than he had at the previous one. According to an account made by Ignace, “a crowd had formed in the Parc Saint-Fargeau; the telegraph was set on fire, and when the workers returned to the park to continue their work, the crowd had to be prevented from throwing them into the fire as well. The experiment could not be continued…” As Holzmann and Pehrson have deduced from these actions, “The system was suspected to be a subversive instrument, meant to send signals to the enemy, which at this time included royalists, Austrians, Prussians, and Englishmen.”
Despite opposition from both the public and the state, Chappe continued to improve his design in pursuit of its approval. A revised method, developed with extensive help from the famed clock-maker Abraham-Louis Breguet, consisted of 30-foot-high semaphore arms configurable using a pulley system and a manual containing over 8,000 possible messages using 196 unique configurations.
The naming of the device at this stage in its development, as it was the subject of at least some internal debate, reveals much about its anticipated significance in the dimensions of space and time. Though Chappe had originally planned on naming it a ‘tachygraphe,’ meaning “fast writer,” under the advice of the chef de division à l'intérieur André François Miot de Mélito, the device was subsequently named a ‘télégraphe,’ meaning “far writer.” As Miot de Mélito gloated in his memoir, “The name telegraph has remained, and it has, as they say, made a fortune.
Given Chappe’s many clock-based designs, as well as his collaboration with Breguet and his insistence on the speed of its message relay system as its primary technological contribution to the government, there is little wonder why he initially chose to describe it as a fast device. Miot de Mélito advice to shift its prefix from ‘tachy’ to ‘tele’—‘fast’ to ‘far’—however, suggests a recognition that telecommunication provided a wholly different relay method than any form of transportation which might more easily be described as ‘fast.’ “Compounded with verbal roots,” writes historian Wolf Kittler, “the prefix tēle- serves to denote the ways in which humans relate to the space they inhabit. These include the perception of distant objects through eye and ear, as well as the overcoming of spatial differences not only through gestures and the voice, but also with weapons and technical media.”
While the speed of any form of ground-based transportation, such as the horse or ambulant person available during the 18th century or the automobile or train of the present-day, is dependent upon the material conditions of both itself and the land it moves against, the speed of Chappe’s telegraph system was dependent instead on the perspicuity of the air as a medium for visual information, as an immaterial entity, to move through. Even electrical telegraphy, which would later succeed optical telegraphy, requires the physical transport of electrical signals across a wire that must either contend with the ground plane or be lofted above it. To emphasize the unique quality of optical telecommunication, the letterhead Chappe would later use on his stationary depicted the god Mercury carrying his semaphore arm as he glided effortlessly through the clouds.
“[T]he transmission of messages and the transport of objects or freight remained, in principle, one and the same until the end of the eighteenth century,” writes Kittler. “[T]hey both had to be entrusted to real human or animal legs, as in the case of the horse-drawn stagecoaches of the Turn and Taxis family from medieval to modern Europe, or of the Pony Express in the American West.” While optical telegraphy and transportation both require unique spatial conditions in order to function, in other words, the ‘speed’ of the former is determined by the distance between its sender and receiver rather than the physical movement of an object through space.
Furthermore, messages from Chappe’s telegraph could only travel as fast as they were created and deciphered from either end using telescopes. Perfected over centuries, the telescope, meaning “far seer,” collapses the distance between any two spaces by allowing information to be received optically rather than physically. As the philosopher Paul Virilio elaborates,
“The moment they appeared on the scene, the first optical devices (Al-Hasan ibn al-Haitam aka Alhazen's camera obscura in the tenth century, Roger Bacon's instruments in the thirteenth, the increasing number of visual prostheses, lenses, astronomic telescopes and so on from the Renaissance on) profoundly altered the contexts in which mental images were topographically stored and retrieved, the imperative to re-present oneself, the imaging of the imagination which was such a great help in mathematics according to Descartes and which he considered a veritable part of the body, veram partem corporis. Just when we were apparently procuring the means to see further and better the unseen of the universe, we were about to lose what little power had of imagining it. The telescope, that epitome of the visual prosthesis, projected an image of a world beyond our reach and thus another way of moving about in the world, the logistics of perception inaugurating an unknown conveyance of sight that produced a telescoping of near and far, a phenomenon of acceleration obliterating our experience of distances and dimensions.”
Yet rather than point his telescope toward the sky as for which it was initially designed, Chappe aimed it across the landscape and based his system on how far it allowed him to see; in his hands, the device became less about “to see further and better the unseen of the universe” than to discipline the enormity of Earthly space relative to the human scale. Speed was the vocation of those who would operate the optical telegraphs and the telescopes used to activate them; distance was the vocation of the devices themselves. If done with the proper coordination, and under the right meteorological conditions, the relayed messages would nearly have the instantaneity of face-to-face communication.
Chappe presented this semaphore method to the National Convention in Spring 1793 with the confidence that it adequately resolved the various issues of visibility, discernibility, and achievable distance present in previous iterations. He found an unabashed supporter of the semaphore design in Charles-Gilbert Romme, the creator of the French Republican Calendar and respected member of the Convention, who commended Chappe in his offering of “an ingenious method to write in the air, using a small number of symbols, simply formed from straight line segments, easily distinguished from one another, that can be executed rapidly and clearly over great distances.”
As he made arrangements for the construction of the 15 stations that would constitute the Paris-Lille line, Chappe was given permission to either construct new towers on which to place his semaphore device or repurpose pre-existing structures to reduce construction costs. Additionally, according to the historian Rollo Appleyard, “he could cut down any trees that might interfere with the line of vision.”
Though no longer present, semaphore arms were constructed atop at least two pre-existing Parisian structures of unique social and historic significance in the construction of this first line: the Church of Saint-Pierre and the Louvre. The former, located high atop the hill of Montmartre, had operated as a Roman Catholic church since it was constructed in 1147 until the Revolution when, like so many other places of worship, it was reappropriated as a Temple of Reason, a site of debate for the Cult of Reason, the first established state-sponsored atheistic religion. In a similar fashion, the latter transitioned from the Louvre Palace—a central icon of the monarchy since 1546—to the Louvre Museum, a public museum dedicated to both the sciences and the arts, as it had been instituted by the National Assembly in 1791 after its private collection had been seized as national property.
Like the first optical telegraph at the Barrière de l'Étoile, the placement of subsequent telegraphs atop the recently converted Church of Saint-Pierre and the Louvre can be interpreted as an attempt at communicating to the public that these devices were not a threat to the “liberté, égalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, fraternity) that they had recently fought for, but rather an integral component of that continued fight for the First French Republic (the motto, afterall, had been chiseled into the facade of every Temple of Reason and was the essential ethos of the Louvre Museum as part of its transition). Indeed, the sight of mechanical metal bars atop relatively ancient structures could have theoretically been received by the public as signals of a bright new future made possible through technological change.
Still wary of public skepticism toward his device amid the unfolding of the Revolution, however, Chappe sent his brother Abraham to Lille to oversee its construction on the opposite end so as to avoid interceptors. As Holzmann and Pehrson recount, antagonism not only came from the locals, but from the hired telegraph operators as well. “Funds appropriated by the Convention were always slow in coming, and the Chappes understandably had a hard time convincing workers to stay on the job without pay, sometimes for weeks on end. Abraham noted in one of his letters that the people in Lille were starting to avoid him, and were treating him with increasing hostility.”
By 1798, the first network of optical telegraphs lines, six miles apart on average, had finally been established, allowing Paris to maintain quick communicative channels in all four directions: Lille in the North, Strasbourg in the East, Lyon in the South, and Brest in the West. These lines were likely done in coordination with novel topographic studies being produced at the time, which were conducted as a means of demarcarting administrative boundaries in three dimensions.
The recently completed optical telegraph network, now offering communication in every major direction, held an even greater significance for the political regime that took over the following year. The Coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9th, 1799), planned by Napoleon Bonaparte in his effort to seize control from the French Directory, signalled the end of the Revolution as the nation quickly transitioned into a more authoritarian government that became more focused on centralization than it had in the previous decade. Once quoted as saying that “strategy is the art of using time and space well,” Napoleon possibly saw more potential in the spatio-temporal nature of the optical telegraph system than anyone in French power had in the prior decade. His first known use of the optical telegraph system was shortly after this event, in which he had a brief message sent from the center to the provinces that may sound ominous in hindsight: “Paris is quiet and the good citizens are content.”
Under Napoleonic rule, writes Josef Konvitz, “Paris organized France as a rational construct inseparable from its administrative order: communication, not commerce, bound provincial France to Paris.” In 1801, therefore, Napoleon requested the construction of a line across the English Channel in pursuit of conquering England (though this line was never in operation), and shortly after declaring himself the Emperor of France in 1804, the elongation and multiplication of the current optical telegraph lines exceeding the French border into Italy and extending far beyond the French capital—particularly to Turin, Milan, and Toulon in Southern France—had been completed.
In the latter decades of its operation, the citizens of France had essentially changed their opinion about the towers that a previous generation had regularly attempted to dismantle. The concern became less that the optical telegraphs would be the subject of vandalism, in fact, than of imitation through private use—suggesting that the general population had popularly viewed them as a tool for communicative freedom not unlike the recently developed railway had been one for transportation (rather than encourage public enthusiasm for the network, however, the government banned the creation of private telegraphs in 1837). And having developed a far greater infrastructure for its optical network than any other nation that had developed imitative versions of their own, the French Academy of Sciences initially rejected the opportunity to transition to an electrical telegraphy system when it was presented by Samuel Morse in 1838, under suspicion that they could easily be sabotaged as the optical telegraphs once were.
The optical telegraph system continued to expand until the last line was raised in 1846, comprising a network of 556 towers covering roughly 3,100 miles by 1846—a far greater communication matrix than Chappe could have imagined in his lifetime. The French government saw little reason to reevaluate its communication technology until the inception of the Crimean War (October 16th, 1853 - March 30th, 1856). “[T]he Crimean War saw the establishment of military field telegraphs and the use of two telegraphic systems: optical (Chappe) and electrical,” writes the historian Yakup Bektas. “The electrical system was still being developed and the rival optical system had not been superseded.”
During the turbulent first stages of the nation’s will to democracy, the optical telegraph system’s requirement to clear land newly seized from the monarchy, as well as the cryptic nature of their aerial communication system—in plain view of the general population yet only decipherable by state officials—rendered Chappe’s optical telegraph first as the subject of popular mistrust, then as one of imperial conquest, and finally as one of popular imitation as it finally—albeit briefly—became a fixture of the French landscape and its airways.
