this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
271 points (97.5% liked)
Asklemmy
44148 readers
1339 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Check it out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph
Optical telegraphs, also called semaphores, were invented in 1684, and first experimented in 1767. The most popular system was invented in 1792. There are a lot of hills around the US and Europe named “Telegraph Hill” because they used to be where an optical telegraph station was set up.
You’re thinking of the electric telegraph, which was indeed invented in 1837, and very quickly supplanted optical telegraphs. We now use the term telegraph almost exclusively to describe the electric telegraph, but someone from the 1700s wouldn’t know that.