[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 48, Issue 13

[odlyzko at umn.edu]

Just a few historical comments, which I will build on
a response to a question that was posed by Vint Cerf:

> Didn't the Rothschild's set up a semaphore system to relay stock market
> information faster than other means, to their advantage?

That seems unlikely.  But they did have one of the best
and most extensive private courier businesses, which did
give them a competitive advantage, and this system did
use a variety of technologies, including pigeons.

The widespread story that the first really rich and
powerful Rothschild, Nathan Mayer, made his first fortune
from early news of the results of the Battle of Waterloo
has been pretty convincingly debunked.  But it is
conceivable he may have been involved in setting up
the first effective pigeon service across the English
Channel in the mid-1830s.  Pigeons had been used for
centuries for communication, but only over land or
short stretches of water.  It was only in the mid-1830s
that a successful system was set up to relay stock market
info between Paris and London using pigeons.  It only
functioned a few months in the year, when the weather
was good, and there is no record of who was behind it.
The Rothschilds would have been logical candidates to
get involved.

(BTW, this cross-Channel pigeon system was widely
resented, and there were calls for hunters to station
themselves on likely routes and shoot down the pigeons.
I had a project to try to figure out the date this
method became effective by studying the degree to
which prices in Paris and London were correlated,
but the volunteer undergraduate research assistant
who was working on it did not get very far before
graduating.  I may try to resuscitate that in the
future.)

Long-range optical telegraph systems were only built
by governments, with the most extensive and long-lasting
one by the Chappe brothers in Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France.  A great history of that is in the Holzmann and
Pehrson book, "The Early History of Data Networks."
Short range systems were quite common, though, with
cities or port authorities using them to signal the
arrival of ships.  (Telegraph Hill in San Francisco
is named after one such.)  And crude optical signaling
goes back thousands of years, with central Greece
being informed of the fall of Troy through a series
of fire signals.

All this material is amusing and informative, but it
is rather far afield from the history of packet networks.
Messages in those system were not broken up in packets
that were then mixed with those of other messages, ...

Andrew