Dovetailing histories

Last month I featured an IEEE journal from 1962. Here’s the journal itself at Google Books.

Along with the looking-forward articles, the journal included some plain history pieces. An article on p 752 by Colin Cherry tried to cover the ENTIRE history of mass communication, with a unique insight that our modern propaganda has wiped out.

= = = = = START 1962 QUOTE:

In the author’s opinion the really important social aspects of modern telecommunication derive, first, from their great reliability and second, from their universality, by which is meant their use by every man, woman and child.

These two factors have enabled the sheer size of societies to grow from the village to the city-state to the antique empires, until today our society, in the sense of areas of mutual dependence and cultural exchange, is being forced into global size.

In early historic times there was indeed long distance communication, covering empires and the known world, but it was confined to diplomatic, military and governmental use by emperors, generals, and other privileged aristocracy over the whole historic period from the Persian Empire to the coming of the railways.

The various accounts of these ancient postal services all emphasize these points: precision of timing and certainty of arrival. Caesar had to know that his messages were received and when he could expect a reply. Truly we have increased the speed by one or two orders of magnitude in modern times, but we have also vastly increased the reliability and the scale.

Caesar, in the form of authority, now appears in every home.

= = = = = END 1962 QUOTE.

Modern propaganda tells us that all communication, and especially the NSA web, is meant for “free debate” and exercising our “natural rights”. This is a weird delusion created by Caesar to keep us from noticing that Caesar is still the SOLE OWNER AND PURPOSE of all communication.

= = = = = START 1962 QUOTE:

The Roman postal system was carried into Europe by the Roman occupation forces, and stayed there in various centers long after the collapse of their Empire. Indeed the system remained essentially the same until the late medieval period; at that early time several postal establishments in various states of Europe were run by the Universities! The University of Paris, for instance, ran a postal service from the early 13th century until the 18th.

= = = = = END 1962 QUOTE.

NSA placed its web first in universities, who serve the same purpose now that they served in their post-Roman origin. Universities cultivate strict orthodoxy and punish heretics.

= = = = = START 1962 QUOTE:

From the first days, postal services seem to have been organized under government control and used for carrying the king’s messages. It was not until the 17th century that the full social need for regular mail service to be used by government officials, merchants and all but the “common people” was realized.

The voice and vision of authority now appears in every home, to carry out education or propaganda, to inform or to deceive, to inflame or to hypnotise, to unify our language or to initiate clichés and slang, to model our heroes and set our norms. There is no doubt that radio and television will largely decide the road along which our society will pass into the future. They can be terrible instruments. We must watch ourselves.

= = = = = END 1962 QUOTE.

Nuff said.

= = = = =

The Bell system produced another long-range history as a movie in 1947. The Bell timeline starts with a dramatic and poetic intro, church bells announcing the end of the war. We then hear the news carried by radio, newsboys, and jungle drums. War-ending joy is obsolete. Our wars no longer end and no longer have victories. Each war goes on forever, enriching the rich and killing the poor.

After the joyful opening, Bell covers the same long interval, hitting entirely different highlights. The Bell timeline and the Colin Cherry timeline could be meshed like a dovetail to form a complete history.

Bell included the Chappe semaphores, which are NEVER mentioned in modern histories of communication, and weren’t mentioned in Cherry’s 1962 timeline. Their visual representation seems to be a real place, not an animation, but bears no resemblance to any of the semaphore systems I was reading about and animating. This machine couldn’t have worked in the 1700s. I think they were trying to show the motions along with the perceived letters, not trying to represent the real thing.

I was trying to do the same thing with the real Chappe:

Bell’s description agrees with Cherry’s emphasis on total authority and military control of the system.

The wars and revolutions that reshaped Europe in the 18th century were signaled across the country by the earliest semaphore. Across the English channel flashed letters that spelled the victories and defeats of the Napoleonic army..

In other words, the Brits were spying on the semaphores, just as they continued spying on Euro telephone and radio transmitters in WW1 and WW2. The first Eye of Five Eyes is a very old eye.

The Chappe stations were sometimes 10 miles apart and always used telescopes to read messages from the upstream and downstream stations. So the Brits must have been doing the same thing from the other side.