18th Century Messaging

Low-tech magazine has an article about an 18th century French communications system that could send a message from Amsterdam to Venice in 1 hour. The system consisted of a towers fitted with semaphore signals. The operator in each tower watches the previous tower through a telescope and copies its signal. The operator also looks at the tower before the previous one to confirm the signal is correct.

I've only started looking at the Low-tech Magazine site but it looks interesting so far.

via slashdot