History of Communication — 2-Part Series

• Part 1: Communication Before Electricity (current)
• Part 2: From the Telegraph to the Internet

Pre-Electric Communication: How Humans Transmitted Information Before the Telegraph

In September 1870, Prussian forces besieged Paris. With all land routes sealed, the French government made a desperate choice: they loaded trained carrier pigeons onto balloons and launched them over the siege lines. Outside the city, the birds received messages recorded on microfilm and flew back to the surrounded capital. Each pigeon could carry only a tiny payload, yet through this method Parisians exchanged approximately 115,000 official dispatches and more than one million private letters.^[1]

Electricity began to be harnessed for communication in earnest during the 1840s. For the thousands of years before that, humanity depended on fire and smoke, drumbeats, flags, pigeons, human legs, and horses’ hooves to carry news to distant recipients. These methods may look primitive, but behind each one lay a remarkable system and an underlying logic.

Fire and Smoke: The Fastest Primitive Signal

The oldest visual signals are fire and smoke. Using smoke by day and firelight by night to relay messages across long distances is a practice that dates to the very beginning of human civilization.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus recorded the legend that news of victory at Troy was carried by beacon fires. Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon also features a chain of signal fires stretching hundreds of kilometres from Troy to Argos.^[2] These accounts are tinged with mythological embellishment, but they vividly capture how powerfully the beacon fire was perceived as a medium of communication.

In China, beacon towers were erected along the Great Wall for hundreds of kilometres. The number and shape of smoke columns announced the scale of an enemy force. A single column of smoke signalled a small incursion; two or three columns signalled a large-scale invasion. The towers stood roughly five to fifteen kilometres apart, and this spacing allowed information to travel rapidly by relay across great distances.^[3]

The decisive limitation of beacon fires was that they could only convey simple yes-or-no signals. They were excellent for broadcasting emergencies, but wholly inadequate for complex messages. In the second century BCE, the Greek historian Polybius proposed a solution: arrange the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet in a five-by-five grid, then indicate a letter’s row and column by the position of torches.^[4] This idea — essentially converting letters into numeric coordinates — was a primitive precursor to digital encoding, but there is no evidence it was ever used on a wide scale.

Many Native American communities also made sophisticated use of smoke signals. By varying the number, pattern, and interval of puffs, they communicated danger warnings, assembly calls, and general news. Within a community these signals carried clear meaning, but to outsiders they were effectively a cipher.^[3]

Drums and Horns: A Language for the Ears

Where dense forest or thick fog made visual signals impractical, sound offered an alternative. Peoples of Central and West Africa in particular developed elaborate percussive communication systems known as “talking drums.”

Talking drums are far more than simple rhythmic signals. The languages of this region — especially Bantu languages such as Lingala — are tonal: the same syllable changes meaning depending on whether it is spoken at a high or low pitch. Drummers reproduced these pitch distinctions, and a skilled player could transmit full sentences to listeners tens of kilometres away.^[5]

The missionary and ethnographer John McKinney McKenzie, working in the Congo in the 1890s, documented how this drum-language system could relay news between villages hundreds of kilometres apart in a matter of minutes. When he travelled upstream by steamboat, he found that villages far upriver already knew of his arrival long before he got there.^[5]

While African drum languages could carry sentence-level information, the bugles and horns used for military purposes in Europe and Asia were far simpler. Commands such as advance, retreat, assembly, and halt were encoded as pre-agreed melodic phrases — simple, but capable of cutting through the chaos of a battlefield instantly.

Carrier Pigeons: Messengers of the Sky

It has been known for thousands of years that domestic pigeons possess exceptional homing ability. Records of pigeons being used for communication survive from ancient Egypt and Persia.^[6] Their widest use, however, came during the medieval and early modern periods and during the two World Wars.

The Abbasid Caliphate, centred on Baghdad from the ninth to the thirteenth century, operated a systematic pigeon-post network. Pigeon exchanges were established between major cities and fortresses, each exchange maintaining birds trained to fly in both directions. Messages were fastened to a pigeon’s leg or tucked into its feathers.^[6]

The fatal weakness of pigeon post was its one-way nature. A pigeon returns only to the place where it was raised. To send a message from Paris to London, birds that had been transported from London to Paris first had to be available — which demanded reciprocal exchanges of birds and careful, systematic management.

Despite this constraint, pigeons remained tenacious instruments of war. In October 1918, during the First World War, the “Lost Battalion” of the U.S. Army’s 77th Division was cut off in a French forest, caught between fire from its own artillery and German encirclement. To communicate their position to friendly forces, the unit released its last surviving pigeon, “Cher Ami.” Though struck by German fire — losing one eye and sustaining a leg wound — Cher Ami flew 65 kilometres to headquarters in just 25 minutes. Its message saved 194 soldiers.^[7] Cher Ami was awarded a medal and, preserved by taxidermy, remains on display at the Smithsonian Institution to this day.

Relay Stations and Messengers: The Roads That Held Empires Together

One of the most reliable ways to transmit news quickly across great distances was simply to have a person carry it. Since human endurance has limits, empires developed relay-messenger systems at staging posts.

The best-known early example is the Persian Empire’s system of the fifth century BCE. The Achaemenid dynasty built the Royal Road — roughly 2,700 kilometres from the capital Susa to the Aegean coast — and stationed relay posts roughly every 25 kilometres. Fresh horses and messengers waited at each post. Herodotus wrote of this system: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents these couriers from completing their designated stages with utmost speed.”^[8] That sentence would later become the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service.

The Roman Empire refined this concept further. The relay system established in the age of Augustus rested on a road network totalling roughly 80,000 kilometres across the empire. Through this system, imperial commands and major official documents could travel around 80 kilometres per day, and records indicate that in emergencies up to 250 kilometres per day was possible.^[9]

The Mongol Empire’s “Yam” system of the thirteenth century was unrivalled in scale. Built by Genghis Khan and expanded by Kublai Khan, this network of relay stations stretched from eastern China to Eastern Europe. Staging posts were placed roughly every 40 kilometres, each stocked with dozens of horses, food, and lodging. Marco Polo witnessed and documented the system firsthand. Messengers carried special tablets of authority that entitled them to receive a fresh horse and provisions immediately.^[10]

These relay systems were far more than communication tools. Information was power. An emperor or khan who could learn rapidly what was happening in every corner of the empire could respond swiftly to rebellion or invasion. The relay system was the nervous system of empire.

Semaphore: A Language Written with Arms

In late eighteenth-century France, the most sophisticated pre-electric communication system in history came into being: Claude Chappe’s optical telegraph — a network of semaphore towers.

The Chappe brothers conducted their first successful experiment in 1791 over a stretch of roughly 16 kilometres between two villages north of Paris. The system worked as follows: on top of a tall tower, a long pivoting arm and two shorter arms were installed. The angular positions of the arms created distinct symbols. An operator watching through a telescope read the configuration on the previous tower and replicated it on the next. In this way, a message traversed the 230 kilometres from Paris to Lille in just 9 minutes.^[11]

The revolutionary French government recognised the strategic value immediately. In 1794, during the war, news of a city recaptured from Austria arrived in Paris via semaphore, and the revolutionary assembly erupted in jubilation. A dispatch that would have taken a relay rider days had arrived in minutes.

Chappe’s semaphore network subsequently spread across Europe. By 1844, France alone had 534 towers linking 29 major cities over more than 5,000 kilometres of routes.^[11] Sweden, Russia, England, and others built independent optical telegraph networks of their own.

Semaphore was revolutionary in speed for its day, but it had a critical weakness: the weather. In thick fog, driving rain, or blizzard, operators simply could not see the signals on the next tower through their telescopes. At night it was useless unless lights were installed. Each tower also required a trained operator on constant standby, making operating costs substantial — maintaining the entire French semaphore network required thousands of staff annually. The line-of-sight requirement between towers was another significant constraint.

In naval contexts, a different form of semaphore evolved. Ships communicated using combinations of flags or signal lamps, and in the 1790s Admiral Sir Home Popham of the Royal Navy standardised a flag-signal code. It was this system that carried Admiral Nelson’s famous message to his fleet on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “England expects that every man will do his duty.”^[12]

Pre-Electric Post: Slow but Systematic

Unlike visual or auditory signals and pigeons, the postal service — physically transporting letters and documents — could deliver complex information reliably. The trade-off was speed.

Where the Persian relay system had served mainly to carry military commands and official documents, early modern Europe developed a postal service accessible to private citizens as well. In 1505, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I established official postal routes connecting Habsburg territories.^[13] The system quickly became the essential backbone of commercial correspondence.

Postal speed still depended on horses and the condition of roads. In eighteenth-century England, mail coaches linking major cities travelled around 100 kilometres per day. The roughly 650 kilometres from London to Edinburgh took about two and a half days — considered very fast at the time — before railway mail in the mid-nineteenth century brought about another revolution in speed.

The most dramatic episode in the history of relays and post is the American Pony Express of 1860. It delivered letters from St Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California — approximately 2,900 kilometres — in under ten days. Riders changed horses roughly every 20 kilometres and each covered an average of about 125 kilometres per day.^[14] Yet the Pony Express closed in October 1861, the very month the transcontinental telegraph line opened. Against electric signals, hooves were helpless.

How Each Limitation Summoned the Next Invention

Looking at pre-electric communication methods together, a striking pattern emerges: each method carried a different set of trade-offs.

Beacon fires were fast but could transmit almost no information. Drums worked only in certain environments and excelled at pre-agreed signals rather than complex content. Pigeons could carry detailed documents but were one-directional and vulnerable to weather and predators. Relay riders could carry any information at all, but could never exceed the pace of a horse. Semaphore was fast and capable of encoding complex messages, but was enslaved to weather and line of sight.

These limitations were not mere technical defects. Each one posed a question pointing toward the next invention: is there a method that is immune to weather, faster than a horse, and capable of carrying complex information? The answer that question pointed toward was electricity.

As understanding of electromagnetic phenomena deepened in the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone independently developed electric telegraphs. In 1844, Morse sent the first official message — “What hath God wrought” — over 64 kilometres from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore.^[15] Electrical signals reached wherever wires ran, regardless of weather, almost instantaneously.

France’s semaphore towers were dismantled one by one over the following decades. Carrier pigeons survived only as an emergency backup for when communication lines were severed in wartime. Relay stations yielded their place to railway mail. These systems, which had long served as the nervous system of humanity, quietly stepped aside before the new force of electricity.

What Disappeared — and What Remained

The pre-electric communication systems refined over thousands of years were not simply obsolete technologies. Within them were already embedded the core principles of information transmission: relay, encoding, redundancy against error, prioritisation, and network design. In the age of digital communication, those principles are still alive. What changed is only the medium.

Where the smoke of beacon towers once rose, fibre-optic cables now run. Where the relay horses of the Yam stations once galloped, packet-switching routers now carry information onward. The tools have changed, but the fundamental logic those systems shared — dividing distance, agreeing on signals, passing the message to the next node — lives on, unchanged, in the flow of internet packets today.

This story continues in Part 2: From the Telegraph to the Internet.