On 30 August 1794, the French National Convention received news that the fortress town of Condé-sur-l'Escaut had been retaken from the Austrians — news that was barely an hour old. A courier on relays of horses would have needed the best part of a day to bring it. Instead the message had sprinted more than two hundred kilometres from the northern frontier to Paris through the air, passed from hilltop tower to hilltop tower by great wooden arms swinging against the sky. France had just switched on the world's first telecommunications network — a mechanical internet, sixty years before the electric one.
Its inventor, Claude Chappe, was a clergyman who lost his living in the Revolution and turned to science. With his brothers he experimented on signalling systems, and absorbed an early lesson in revolutionary politics: Parisian crowds twice wrecked his prototypes, suspecting the strange apparatus of sending royalist messages. A brother in the legislature, Ignace, won him a proper hearing, and after a successful long-distance trial in 1791 the project gathered pace. Chappe wanted to call his machine the tachygraphe, the "fast writer"; the statesman Miot de Mélito suggested something better — télégraphe, the "far writer" — and gave the world a word it would keep long after the towers fell. In 1793 the Convention, at war with half of Europe and desperate for fast intelligence, funded a line from Paris to Lille, near the northern front. It opened in 1794: a chain of relay stations roughly ten kilometres apart.
Ninety-two signals
Each station carried a crossbeam, the regulator, with a pivoting arm — an indicator — at either end, worked by cranks from a room below. The arms could form nearly a hundred distinct configurations, of which ninety-two were used. Signals were sent in pairs: the first gave a page number, the second a line number, in a secret codebook of ninety-two pages with ninety-two entries per page — 8,464 words and phrases in all. The system's security was elegantly bureaucratic: the operators cranking the arms in the relay towers simply copied whatever their telescope showed at the neighbouring station, with no idea what any of it meant. Only the terminal stations held the codebooks.
In clear weather a single signal could flash down the whole Paris–Lille line in a couple of minutes. Full dispatches took far longer, but nothing on Earth was faster, and Napoleon leaned on the system heavily as lines pushed outward — north into the Low Countries, east towards Strasbourg, south through Lyon and over the Alps towards Milan. At its peak the French network ran to more than five hundred stations, linking Paris with some twenty-nine cities. Other nations copied the idea: Sweden built its own optical telegraph in 1794, and the British Admiralty ran a shutter-telegraph chain from London to Portsmouth from 1796. The weaknesses were just as obvious — the towers were blind at night and in fog, and the network was a state monopoly carrying official traffic, with one curious civilian exception: the winning national lottery numbers.
The first hack
Where there is a network, there is soon a network exploit. In 1834 the brothers François and Joseph Blanc, who traded government bonds at Bordeaux, faced a familiar problem: market-moving news from Paris took days to arrive by mail coach, and whoever heard it first won. Their solution was to hack the state telegraph. They bribed the operator at Tours, on the line towards Bordeaux, to insert a deliberate, recognisable error into official messages whenever an accomplice in Paris signalled which way the market had moved. The corrupted symbol was marked for deletion, so the clerks at the far end ignored it — but it still passed, tower by tower, through every relay in between, where a watcher hired by the Blancs read it through a telescope near Bordeaux. The scheme ran for nearly two years before it unravelled in 1836, when the Tours operator fell ill and tried to recruit a successor, who talked. At trial the brothers walked free: France had no law against misusing a telegraph, because nobody had imagined it possible. The affair is now routinely cited as history's first network hack — data smuggled inside legitimate traffic, an insider on the payroll, and the law years behind the technology.
Chappe himself saw none of this. Worn down by illness and by rivals claiming to have invented his machine, he took his own life in 1805, throwing himself down a well at the telegraph administration. His network outlived him by half a century, until the electric telegraph of Cooke, Wheatstone and Morse made wooden arms obsolete; France closed its last optical lines in the 1850s. Alexandre Dumas gave the system a literary send-off in The Count of Monte Cristo, whose hero bribes a poorly paid semaphore operator to transmit false news and ruin a banker — fiction, but every reader knew about the Blancs. The mechanical internet ran for some sixty years and was being defrauded for two of them; every network since has inherited both the relay and the insider exploit.
Quiz nuggets
- Claude Chappe's first optical telegraph line, Paris to Lille, opened in 1794; that August it delivered news of the recapture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut about an hour after the event.
- Chappe wanted to call his machine the tachygraphe ("fast writer"); the statesman Miot de Mélito suggested télégraphe ("far writer").
- Signals were sent in pairs pointing into a codebook of 92 pages with 92 entries each — 8,464 words and phrases.
- In 1834–36 the Blanc brothers bribed the Tours operator to smuggle bond-market news inside official traffic — often called history's first network hack; they were acquitted because no law covered it.
- Chappe took his own life in 1805; France's optical network peaked at over 500 stations before the electric telegraph closed it in the 1850s.