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symbols, simply formed from straight line segments,”♦ reported one of them, Gilbert Romme, in 1793. He persuaded the Convention to appropriate six thousand francs for the construction of three telegraph towers in a line north of Paris, seven to nine miles apart. The Chappe brothers moved rapidly now and by the end of summer arranged a triumphant demonstration for the watching deputies. The deputies liked what they saw: a means of receiving news from the military frontier and transmitting their orders and decrees. They gave Chappe a salary, the use of a government horse, and an official appointment to the post of ingénieur télégraphe. He began work on a line of stations 120 miles long, from the Louvre in Paris to Lille, on the northern border. In less than a year he had eighteen in operation, and the first messages arrived from Lille: happily, news of victories over the Prussians and Austrians. The Convention was ecstatic. One deputy named a pantheon of four great human inventions: printing, gunpowder, the compass, and “the language of telegraph signs.”♦ He was right to focus on the language. In terms of hardware—ropes, levers, and wooden beams—the Chappes had invented nothing new.

A CHAPPE TELEGRAPH

Construction began on stations in branches extending east to Strasbourg, west to Brest, and south to Lyon. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, he ordered a message sent in every direction—“Paris est tranquille et les bons citoyens sont contents” (“Paris is quiet and the good citizens are happy”)—and soon commissioned a line of new stations all the way to Milan. The telegraph system was setting a new standard for speed of communication, since the only real competition was a rider on horseback. But speed could be measured in two ways: in terms of distance or in terms of symbols and words. Chappe once claimed that a signal could go from Toulon to Paris—a line of 120 stations across 475 miles—in just ten or twelve minutes.♦ But he could not make that claim for a full message, even a relatively short one. Three signals per minute was the most that could be expected of even the fastest telegraph operator. The next operator in the chain, watching through a telescope, had to log each signal by hand in a notebook, reproduce it by turning his own cranks and pulleys, and watch to make sure it was received correctly by the next station. The signal chain was vulnerable and delicate: rain, fog, or an inattentive operator would break any message. When success rates were measured in the 1840s, only two out of three messages were found to arrive within a day during the warm months, and in winter the rate dropped to one in three. Coding and decoding took time, too, but only at the beginning and end of the line. Operators at intermediate stations were meant to relay signals without understanding them. Indeed, many stationaires were illiterate.

THE FRENCH TELEGRAPH NETWORK IN ITS HEYDAY

When messages did arrive, they could not always be trusted. Many relay stations meant many chances for error. Children everywhere know this, from playing the messaging game known in Britain as Chinese Whispers, in China as , in Turkey as From Ear to Ear, and in the modern United States simply as Telephone. When his colleagues disregarded the problem of error correction, Ignace Chappe complained, “They have probably never performed experiments with more than two or three stations.”♦

Today the old telegraphs are forgotten, but they were a sensation in their time. In London, a Drury Lane entertainer and songwriter named Charles Dibdin put the invention into a 1794 musical show and foresaw a marvelous future:

If you’ll only just promise you’ll none of you laugh,

I’ll be after explaining the French telegraph!

A machine that’s endow’d with such wonderful pow’r,

It writes, reads, and sends news fifty miles in an hour.

…

Oh! the dabblers in lott’ries will grow rich as Jews:

’Stead of flying of pigeons, to bring them the news,

They’ll a telegraph place upon Old Ormond Quay;

Put another ’board ship, in the midst