Part 12 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.--A LETTER CARRIER OF ANCIENT EGYPT.]
The ancient Egyptians, as we would expect, were the first to make use of the letter in the sending of messages (Fig. 1). The ancient Hebrews were also familiar with the letter as a means of communication. We read in the book of Chronicles how the post went with the letters of the king and his princes throughout all Israel. The word _post_, as used here and elsewhere in the Bible, signifies a runner, that is, one specially trained to deliver letters or despatches speedily by running. Thus Jeremiah predicted that after the fall of Babylon ”one post shall run to meet another and one messenger to meet another to show the King that his city is taken.” Although we frequently read of the post in Biblical times we are nowhere told that the ordinary people enjoyed the privileges of the post. In olden times it was only kings and princes and persons of high degree that sent and received letters.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.--AN EGYPTIAN MAIL CART.]
In nearly all the countries of antiquity there was an organized postal system which was under the control of the government and which carried only government messages. In Egypt there were postal chariots (Fig. 2) of wonderful lightness designed especially for carrying the letters of the king at the greatest possible speed. In ancient Judea messengers must have traveled very fast, for Job, in his old age, says: ”Now my days are swifter than the post, they flee away.” In ancient Persia the postal system awakened the admiration of Herodotus. ”Nothing mortal,”
says this old Greek historian, ”travels so fast as these Persian messengers. The entire plan is a Persian invention and this is the method of it. Along the whole line of road there are men stationed with horses, the number of stations being equal to the number of days which the journey takes, allowing a man and a horse to each day, and these men will not be hindered from accomplis.h.i.+ng at their best speed the distance they will have to go either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by the darkness of night. The first rider delivers the message to the second and the second to the third, and so it is borne from hand to hand along the whole line.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3.--A LETTER CARRIER OF ANCIENT GREECE.]
The postal system which Herodotus found in Persia was better than the system which existed in his own country for the reason that the Greeks relied upon human messengers rather than upon horses to carry their messages. Young Greeks were specially trained (Fig. 3) as runners for the postal service and Greek history contains accounts of the marvelous endurance and swiftness of those employed to carry messages. After the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks at Marathon (490 B. C.) a runner carried the news southward and did not pause for rest until he reached Athens when he shouted the word ”Victory!” and expired, being overcome by fatigue. Another Greek, Phillipides by name, was despatched from Athens to Sparta to ask the Spartans for aid in the war which the Athenians were carrying on against Persia, and the distance between the two cities--about 140 miles--was accomplished by the runner in less than two days.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 4.--A LETTER CARRIER OF ANCIENT ROME.]
But the best postal system of ancient times was the one which was organized by the Romans. As one country after another was brought under the dominion of Rome it became more and more necessary for the Roman government to keep in close touch with all the parts of the vast empire.
Accordingly, by the time of Augustus (14 A.D.), there was established throughout the Roman world a fully organized and well-equipped system of posts. Along the magnificent roads which led out from Rome there were built at regular distances stations, or post-houses, where horses and riders were stationed for the purpose of receiving the messages of the government and hurrying them along to the place of their destination.
The stations were only five or six miles apart and each station was provided with a large number of horses and riders. By the frequent changes of horses a letter could be hurried along with considerable speed (Fig. 4). ”By the help of the relays,” says Gibbon, ”it was easy to travel a hundred miles in a day.”
When Rome fell (476 A.D.) before the attacks of barbarous tribes her excellent postal system fell with her and many centuries pa.s.sed before messages could again be regularly and quickly despatched between widely separated points. Charles the Great, the emperor of the Franks, established (800 A.D.) a postal system in his empire but the service did not long survive the great ruler. In the 13th century the merchants of the Hanse towns of Northern Germany could communicate with each other somewhat regularly by letter, but the ordinary people of these towns did not enjoy the privileges of a postal service. In the Middle Ages, as in the ancient times, the public post was established solely for the benefit of the government. Private messages had to be sent as best they could be by private messengers and at private expense. As late as the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) the only regular post route in England was one which was established for the exclusive use of the king.
But the time was soon to come when ordinary citizens as well as officers of state were to share in the benefits of a postal system. In 1635 Charles I of England gave orders that a post should run night and day between Edinburgh and London and that postmen should take with them all such letters as might be directed to towns on or near the road which connected the two cities. The rate of postage[21] was fixed at two pence for a single letter when the distance was under sixty miles; four pence when the distance was between 60 and 140 miles; six pence for any longer distance in England; and eight pence from London to any place in Scotland. It was ordered that only messengers of the king should be allowed to carry letters for profit unless to places to which the king's post did not go. Here was the beginning of the modern postal system and the modern post-office. Henceforth the post was to carry not only the king's messages, but the messages of all people who would pay the required postage.
The example set by England in throwing the post open to the public was followed by other nations, and before a hundred years had pa.s.sed nearly all the civilized countries of the world were enjoying the privilege and blessings of a well-organized postal system. It is true that the post for a long time moved very slowly--a hundred miles a day was regarded as a flying rate--and postage for a long time was very high, but the service grew constantly better and by the close of the nineteenth century trains were das.h.i.+ng along with the mails at the rate of a thousand miles a day and postage within a country had been reduced to two cents,[22] while for a nickel a letter could be sent to the most distant parts of the globe.
Thus far we have traced the history of only one kind of message, the kind that has the form of a written doc.u.ment and that is conveyed by a human carrier over land and water from one place to another. But there is a kind of message which is not borne along by human hands and which does not travel on land or water. This is the _telegraph_,[23] the message which darts through s.p.a.ce and is delivered at a distant point almost at the very instant at which it is sent.
The first telegraph was an aerial message and consisted of a signal made by a flash of light. From the earliest times men have used fire signals as a means of sending messages to distant points. When the city of Troy in Asia Minor was captured by the Greeks (about 1100 B.C.) torches flas.h.i.+ng their light from one mountain top to another quickly carried the news to the far-off cities of Greece. The ancient Greeks gave a great deal of attention to the art of signaling by fire and they invented several very ingenious systems of aerial telegraphy. The most interesting of these systems is one invented and described by the Greek historian Polybius, who flourished about 150 B.C. When signaling with fire Polybius arranged for using two groups of torches with five torches in each group, and for the purpose of understanding the signals he divided the letters of the alphabet into five groups of five letters each.[24] The torches were raised according to a plan that made it possible to flash a signal that would indicate any letter of the alphabet that might be desired. Thus if the desired letter was the third one of the first group--that is, the letter _k_--one torch would show which group was meant and three torches would show which letter was meant (Fig. 5). In theory this system was perfect, for it provided for sending any kind of message whatever. But in practice it had little value, for it required so many torches and signals that an entire night was consumed in spelling out a few words.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 5.--TELEGRAPHING BY MEANS OF FIRE, 150 B. C.]
Although the elaborate system of aerial telegraph proposed by Polybius was not generally adopted, nevertheless for centuries, both in ancient times and during the middle ages, the fire signal was everywhere used for the quick despatch of important news. In the seventeenth century inventors began to devise new systems of aerial telegraphy. In 1663, the Marquis of Worcester, who was always busy with some great invention (p.
178), announced to the world that he had discovered a plan by which one could talk with another as far as the eye could distinguish between black and white, and that this conversation could be carried on by night as well as by day, even though the night were as dark and as black as pitch. But the telegraph of the Marquis was like many of his other inventions--it was chiefly on paper. In 1864, Dr. Robert Hooke of England invented a method by which aerial messages could be sent a distance of thirty or forty miles. His plan was to erect on hill tops a series of high poles connected above by cross-pieces and by means of pulleys suspend from the cross-pieces the letters of the alphabet which would spell out the message (Fig. 6). In order to read the letters at such great distances the eye was a.s.sisted by the telescope, an instrument which had recently been invented.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.--HOOKE'S AERIAL TELEGRAPH, 1684.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 7.--CHAPPE'S AERIAL TELEGRAPH, 1793.]
But the greatest improvement in aerial telegraphy was made during the French Revolution by Claude Chappe, a Frenchman living in Paris. In 1793, Chappe erected on the roof of the palace of the Louvre a post at the top of which was a cross-beam which moved on a pivot about the center like a scale beam (Fig. 7). The cross-beam could be moved horizontally, vertically or at almost any angle by means of cords.
Chappe invented a number of positions for these arms and each position stood for a certain letter of the alphabet. Machines of this kind were erected on towers at places from nine to twelve miles apart and soon Chappe was sending messages from Paris to the city of Lille, 130 miles away. The messages were sent with great rapidity, for they pa.s.sed from one tower to another with the velocity of light--about 185,000 miles a second--and it was possible for the operator to spell out about 100 words in an hour. And Chappe's messages could be sent at any time, day or night, for the arms of the machine were furnished with Argand lamps for night work.
Chappe's invention was the greatest which had thus far been made in the history of the message. The new system of telegraphy proved to be entirely successful and practical and it was not long before machines similar to those invented by Chappe were in use in England and other countries. In 1828, an English writer had the following words of praise for aerial telegraphy: ”Telegraphs have now been brought to so great a degree of perfection that they carry information so speedily and distinctly and are so much simplified that they can be constructed and maintained at little expense. The advantages, too, which result from their use are almost inconceivable. Not to speak of the speed with which information is communicated and orders given in time of war, by means of these aerial signals the whole kingdom could be prepared in an instant to oppose an invading enemy.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 8.--STURGEON ELECTRO-MAGNET, 1825.]
But the aerial telegraph was soon to have a most dangerous rival. This rival was _the electric telegraph_. Many years before the invention of Chappe men had been experimenting with electricity with a view of sending messages by means of an electric current. These experiments began in 1728 when an Englishman named Gray caused electricity to produce motion in light bodies located at a distance of more than 600 feet. In 1748, the great Benjamin Franklin, who conducted so many wonderful experiments in electricity, sent an electric current through a wire which was stretched across the Schuylkill River and set fire to some alcohol which was at the opposite end of the wire. We may regard the flash of alcohol as a telegraph, for it could have been used as a signal. In 1819, Professor Oersted of Copenhagen brought a magnetic needle close to a body through which an electric current was pa.s.sing and he observed that the needle had a tendency to place itself at right angles to the electrified body. In 1825, William Sturgeon of England coiled a copper wire around a bar of soft iron and found that when a current of electricity was sent through the wire the bar of iron became a temporary magnet; that is, the bar of iron attracted a needle when the current was pa.s.sing through the wire and ceased to attract it when the current was broken (Fig. 8). These discoveries of Oersted and Sturgeon led to the invention known as the _electro-magnet_ and the electro-magnet led rapidly to the invention of the electric telegraph, for by means of the electro-magnet a signal can be sent to a distance as far as a current of electricity can be sent along a wire. In 1831, Professor Joseph Henry, one of America's most distinguished scientists, discovered a method by which an electric current could be sent along a wire for a very great distance. The next year Henry constructed and operated an apparatus which was essentially an electric telegraph (Fig.
9). ”I arranged,” he said, ”around one of the upper rooms of the Albany Academy a wire of more than a mile in length through which I was enabled to make signals by sounding a bell. The mechanical arrangement for effecting this object was simply a steel bar permanently magnetized, supported on a pivot and placed with its north end between the two arms of a horse-shoe magnet. When the latter was excited by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one arm of the horse-shoe and repelled by the other and was thus caused to move in a horizontal plane and its further extremity to strike a bell suitably adjusted.”