Some years ago I read Frank Large, Faster than the Wind: the Liverpool to Holyhead Telegraph (Avid 1998), which explains how signals of approaching vessels were transmitted from the western tip of Anglesey to a base at what is now Liverpool’s Pier Head in the early nineteenth century. I found it difficult to understand how this original telegraph, working by visual semaphores, actually worked, but a group of enthusiasts have now reconstructed a French original: bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22909590. A more recent account of the Napoleonic signal-system is Howard Mallinson, Send it by Semaphore: the old telegraphs during the Wars with France (Crowood 2005). This long-forgotten piece of communications technology is, of course, the ancestor of the semaphore railway-signal.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:30:39 +0000
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