Semaphore: The World’s First Telegraph

(via Amusing Planet)  Smoke signals and beacons have been used to relay messages over short distances since ancient times, but the only reliable way to send messages over long distances was to dispatch a messenger or a homing pigeon. But fifty years before dots and dashes killed the messenger, for a brief period, there was another kind of telegraph in Europe.   It was called the semaphore, and relics of this amazingly efficient 19th century network can still be found around Europe.