This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 29th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's hard to overestimate the profound change brought about by the telegraph, it dramatically

reduced the time required for communication across great distances. In short, it

shrunk the world, but was it really, as Anthony Kamegna describes it, the first technological singularity.

We spoke earlier this month.

I think the most interesting immediate precursor to the telegraph was actually a system of semaphore signaling, just like lifeguards do.

But Napoleon, this is one of the major advances in his military management was using semaphore operators

spread across a battlefield to signal very quickly, almost, you know,

relatively speaking, instantaneously across across many many miles of space

perhaps even a country's worth of space like in a place like Belgium or what would

become Belgium in a few decades and And in the United States, businessmen use this. So for example, a few

months after Morse unveiled his telegraph and made the first successful tests in in May of

1844, There was an interesting newspaper article

out of New York I believe where somebody was claiming that there was for some time already a secret telegraph in operation

between Philadelphia and New York by used by businessmen to control the markets

right but it was actually a semaphore system that was totally

out in the open used since I think 1840 by investors. This is not a secret electric

telegraph at all, but you know people wrapped up these

older systems in conspiratorial fashion as Americans are want to do with new

technologies in development.

But these Semophore systems were the fastest way of communicating

text or script of some kind, language.

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