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The Chappe telegraph was a French semaphore telegraph system invented by Claude Chappe in the early 1790s. The system was composed of towers placed every 5 to 15 kilometers. Coded messages were sent from tower to tower, with transmission being handled by tower operators using specially designed telescopes.
A Chappe telegraph tower, in Narbonne, in the south of France. Claude Chappe was born in Brûlon, Sarthe, France, the son of Ignace Chappe, a contrôleur of the Crown lands for Laval, and his wife Marie Devernay, daughter of a physician of Laval. He was raised for church service, but lost his sinecure during the French Revolution.
The most widely used system was the Chappe telegraph, which was invented in France in 1792 by Claude Chappe. It was popular in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. [1] [2] [3] Chappe used the term télégraphe to describe the mechanism he had invented – that is the origin of the English word "telegraph". [4]
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the master tower was repurposed as a simple warehouse. In 1823, its southwest corner hosted the installation of a Chappe telegraph [3] on the Paris-Bayonne line , with a hut also constructed on top of the tower to house the telegraph operator. The electric telegraph replaced it in 1853. [23]
The word telegraph (from Ancient Greek: τῆλε 'at a distance' and γράφειν 'to write') was coined by the French inventor of the semaphore telegraph, Claude Chappe, who also coined the word semaphore. [2] A telegraph is a device for transmitting and receiving messages over long distances, i.e., for telegraphy.
A replica of one of Claude Chappe's semaphore towers (optical telegraph) in Nalbach, Germany. The history of telecommunication began with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the 1790s, the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe.
Chappe code c. 1794. Prior to the electrical telegraph, a widely used method of building national telegraph networks was the optical telegraph consisting of a chain of towers from which signals could be sent by semaphore or shutters from tower to tower.
A replica of a Chappe telegraph tower (18th century). A 'semaphore telegraph', also called a 'semaphore line', 'optical telegraph', 'shutter telegraph chain', 'Chappe telegraph', or 'Napoleonic semaphore', is a system used for conveying information by means of visual signals, using towers with pivoting arms or shutters, also known as blades or paddles.