Claude Chappe

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"Tachygraph" redirects here. For the device used for recording vehicle data, see Tachograph.

Claude Chappe
telecommunications

Claude Chappe (French:

electric telegraph
systems replaced it.

Early life

One example of a Chappe telegraph tower, in Narbonne, in the south of France.

Claude Chappe was born in Brûlon,

Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen.[1]

His uncle was the astronomer Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche, famed for his observations of the Transit of Venus in 1761 and again in 1769. The first book Claude read in his youth was his uncle's journal of the 1761 trip, "Voyage en Siberie". His brother, Abraham, wrote "Reading this book greatly inspired him, and gave him a taste for the physical sciences. From this point on, all his studies, and even his pastimes, were focused on that subject." Because of his astronomer uncle, Claude may also have become familiar with the properties of telescopes.[2]

He and his four unemployed brothers decided to develop a practical system of semaphore relay stations, a task proposed in antiquity, yet never realized.[3]

Claude's brother, Ignace Chappe (1760–1829) was a member of the Legislative Assembly during the French Revolution. With his help, the Assembly supported a proposal to build a relay line from Paris to Lille (fifteen stations, about 120 miles), to carry dispatches from the war.

Chappe's telegraph

The Chappe brothers determined by experiment that the angles of a rod were easier to see than the presence or absence of panels. Their final design had two arms connected by a cross-arm. Each arm had seven positions, and the cross-arm had four more, permitting a 196-combination code. The arms were from three to thirty feet long, black, and counterweighted, moved by only two handles. Lamps mounted on the arms proved unsatisfactory for night use. The relay towers were placed from 12 to 25 km (10 to 20 miles) apart. Each tower had a telescope pointing both up and down the relay line.

Chappe initially called his invention a tachygraph ("fast writer").

Telegraph Chappe.[6] Alternatively, Chappe coined the phrase semaphore,[7] from the Greek elements σῆμα (sêma, "sign"); and from φορός (phorós, "carrying"),[8] or φορά (phorá, "a carrying") from φέρειν (phérein, "to bear").[9]

In 1794, the first messages were successfully sent between Paris and Lille.[6] In 1794 the semaphore line informed Parisians of the capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred. Other lines were built, including a line from Paris to Toulon. The system was widely copied by other European states, and was used by Napoleon to coordinate his empire and army.[6]

In 1805, Claude Chappe killed himself.[10] He was said to be depressed by illness, and claims by rivals that he had plagiarized from military semaphore systems.

Demonstration of the semaphore

In 1824 Ignace Chappe attempted to increase interest in using the semaphore line for commercial messages, such as commodity prices; however, the business community resisted.

From 1844, the government of France funded trials of a new system of

electric telegraph lines and committed to fully replacing the Chappe telegraph in 1846. Many contemporaries warned of the ease of sabotage and interruption of service by cutting a wire. The extent of the French optical telegraph meant that it took some time for the replacement to be completed. The two systems existed side-by-side for about a decade. One of the last messages sent over the Chappe telegraph was news of the fall of Sevastopol in 1855.[11]

Popular culture

The Chappe semaphore figures prominently in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. The Count bribes an underpaid operator to transmit a false message.

Memorials

Statue de Chappe à Paris

Rue Chappe in the

Nazi occupation of Paris, in 1941 or 1942.[13]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Lycée Pierre Corneille de Rouen - The Lycée Corneille of Rouen". lgcorneille-lyc.spip.ac-rouen.fr. Retrieved 1 May 2018.
  2. ^ "The Early History of Data Networks". people.seas.harvard.edu. Archived from the original on 1 April 2017. Retrieved 1 May 2018.
  3. ^ "Claude Chappe". Retrieved 8 May 2024.
  4. ^ Beyer, p. 60
  5. ^ Le Robert historique de la langue française, 1992, 1998
  6. ^ a b c French source: Tour du télégraphe Chappe Archived 28 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions & Discoveries of the 18th Century, Jonathan Shectman, p. 172
  8. ^ Oxford English Dictionary.
  9. ^ Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  10. ^ "Claude Chappe (French engineer)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 25 June 2009. Retrieved 7 August 2009.
  11. ISBN 0818667826
    .
  12. ^ Booking.com, Sacré Coup de Cœur - Studio, accessed 22 January 2023
  13. ^ "Where the Statues of Paris were sent to Die". messynessychic.com. 7 January 2016. Archived from the original on 19 March 2018. Retrieved 1 May 2018.

Bibliography

External links
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