A brief history of communication from the Stone Age to the present day

Sometimes, on a bright day, I saw on the edge of the road, on a hillock, these black jointed arms rising upward, like the paws of a huge beetle, and, I assure you, I always looked at them with excitement... These strange signs, so clearly cutting through the air and transmitting an unknown will for three hundred leagues...” This is how Dumas’ novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” describes one of the curious inventions of the 18th century - the optical telegraph. The towers were lined up in a line of sight from each other. On the roof of each there was a vertical pole with a system of movable slats - their different locations corresponded to different letters or even whole words. Built in 1794, the first telegraph line between Paris and Lille, 210 km long, consisted of 22 towers and took three hours to transmit information.

During the existence of civilization, dozens of types of communications have been invented. Some of them were never fully realized: for example, Semmering's electrochemical telegraph (1809). In his receiving device, each letter corresponded to a flask filled with water - closing the contact caused seething in one of the flasks.

To transmit signals, they used light flashes, columns of smoke, drum beats, shooting from rifles and cannons... In 1796, the message about the beginning of the coronation of Emperor Paul was transmitted by rifle shots from 3,000 soldiers stationed from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Most of the types of communications born of a whimsical mind are still alive today. Even outdated ones - after all, many of them do not require complex infrastructure. For example, carrier pigeon competitions are still held in Russia.

Well, those that require significant costs disappear when their time passes. In the middle of the 19th century, the optical telegraph ceased to exist - it was replaced by the electric telegraph. Today, before our eyes, the electric telegraph is also falling out of use. Everything is like Darwin: survival of the fittest, in this case email, which is simpler and cheaper.

Through the years, across the distances