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A Brief History of the Telegraph
- oldjavacoder 4y agoI saw a picture of a stretch of road in the west and started thinking about the 1800's and the striking contrast between the wild and the technological American landscape. It turns out Google has an interesting site, linked.
- bediger4000 4y agoThere were optical telegraphs before electrical: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph "The Early History of Data Networks" is a good read on the topic: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Early_History_of_Data_Networks.html?id=IvlSAAAAMAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Early_History_of_Da...
- oldjavacoder 4y agoThat's a mind blower, I did not know about it thank you.
- bediger4000 4y agoThe coding for the optical telegraphs seemed primitive to me. I wonder if you couldn't come up with a system that mixed signals going both ways.
- oldjavacoder 4y agoThe semaphore tower method could maybe have supported mixed signals with one operator dedicated to receive/forward and the other operator dedicated to acknowledge with a detailed response.
- bediger4000 4y agoA series of "glyphs" that mixed forward signals and backward signals would help. Old school "local loop" telephones electrically multiplexed signals, but the optical telegraphs were quite a bit more discrete.