Signal Change

Abstract

It is common for surveys on the history of telecommunications to focus on the beginning and end of the subject while glossing over the short-lived experiments in between. Just as the efforts of disparate ancient cultures (including those of Greece, China, and Sri Lanka) to transmit messages across great distances are the common subjects of anthropology, and as Samuel Morse’s struggles to patent the electric telegraph in 1836 have become a staple of media theory, in 1793 France Claude Chappe’s invention of the optical telegraph can be evaluated as a significant device that bridged the fields of communications and geography. The time between the late eighteenth and early nineteenthth century is a uniquely turbulent one in the social, infrastructural, and political history of France. France shifted from the feudalist system of the Ancien Régime to the various constitutional incarnations of the Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon in his tireless pursuit of Parisian centralization. One can therefore appreciate the development of the optical telegraph system using an infrastructure of telecommunications as an attempt to bring order to modern France during its formative period.