Claude Chappe

Biography

Origin

Born the day from its death 1764, Claude Chappe, was named abbot at the end of his studies to the Royal College of the Arrow (today the Prytanée), but it lost its Sinécure during the French revolution. At the twenty years age, it had made insert in the Journal of Physics a great number of memories interesting, which gave him titles to be allowed with the philomathic Société of Paris, where it was accepted with the end of the year 1792.

The system of Cap

He and his/her four brothers unemployed and politicians decided to develop a practical system of stations of relay semaphore. His/her brother Ignace Cap (1760-1830) as member of the legislative assembly helped it to make adopt a line between Paris and Lille of fifteen stations for approximately two hundred kilometers to transmit information of the war.

The Chappe brothers determined by experimentation which the angles of a pole were easier to see than the presence or the absence of panels. Their final construction was two arms connected by a cross-piece. Each arm had seven positions and crosses four is a total code of 196 positions. The arms had from one to four meters length, black, with counterweights moved by two handles. Lamps assembled on the arms were not satisfactory night use. The turns of relay were placed from 12 to 25 km between them. Each turn had two telescopes pointing on each side of the line.

The desire to communicate with friends who lived with a few miles of him made conceive with the young physicist, in 1791, the project to speak to them by signals these attempts succeeded so much so that he realized that what he had believed not to be that a play could become an important discovery. It then did many research to find the means of carrying out its process into large.

In 1791, the first messages were sent successfully between Paris and Lille. When it had achieved the goal that it, had proposed, it offered to the legislative assembly, in 1792, the homage of its discovery; it presented a machine with signals to him, named by him telegraph, of two Greek words tele , far, and graphein , to write. The establishment of the first telegraph line was ordered only in 1793.

Cop

September 1st 1794, the line of semaphore informed the Parisian ones of the victory of Cop-on-the Scheldt over the Autrichiens less than one hour after the event. The system was largely copied in the other European countries, and was used by Napoleon to coordinate his empire and its armies.

Convention accepted this news at the beginning of one of its meetings, returned a decree which declared that Condé would be called North-Free , and the telegraph announced, during this same meeting, that the decree had already arrived to its destination, and that already it circulated in the army. This result created a great sensation then; one included/understood how much the invention telegraph could be useful; but the more important this discovery appeared, the less one conceived that it had not been made earlier.

Systems of telegraphy

Indeed, in all times, one had made use of signals to communicate agreed sentences. The sailors employed this means for an unmemorable time, and an English prince had acquired some celebrity to have improved the marine signals. Enée the tactician mentions some experiment, whose object was to announce the letters of the alphabet to several stations; and, towards the end of the 17th century, Guillaume Amontons had carried out a test of this kind; but the first system can be useful only for one small number of facts, envisaged a long time before one wants to announce them. One night is hardly enough to transmit two or three words according to the method of Enée. As for Amontons, which is placed among the inventors of telegraphic art, it did not leave any trace of the machine which it had imagined. The problem was thus still to solve, or rather was only one project without execution; it consisted in finding the means of transmitting, at some distance that it was, with speed, in all the places and all times, any species of idea.

Telegraphic means

To arrive to this goal, Chappe did not imitate any the machines of which one had been useful oneself hitherto; he imagined of them one whose forms are extremely visible, the simple and easy movements, which can be transported and placed everywhere, which resists the greatest storms, and which, in spite of his great simplicity, gives enough primitive signals to make these signs an exact application to the ideas, application such, which it requires usually only one sign per idea, and never more than two, this which is very remarkable (known as the decennial report/ratio submitted by the class of physical sciences), like this having given birth to a new, simple and exact language, which returns the expression of a word and one phrases by only one sign. (p. 38, edition in-4° 1810.)

These telegraphic means do not resemble entirely those which one had tried to employ before Chappe (see: Hook); some writers claimed that the telegraph was not a discovery, and several rivals tried to present new telegraphic systems, and to put themselves at the place of Cap.

Epilog

In 1805, Claude committed suicide while being thrown in a well with its hotel. It would have been victim of a depression caused by the disease and of the declarations of its rivals according to whom it had plagiarized military systems of semaphores.

In 1824, Ignace tried to increase the interest by using the line of semaphore for commercial messages, such as for example the prices of the raw materials, but that displeased at the community businesses. The same year, his/her brother, Jean Cap, published a Histoire of Telegraphy .

In 1846, the French government made set up a system of electric lines of telegraphs. Several contemporaries informed facility of sabotage and of interruption of service because a wire was so easy to cross.

The system appears in an eminent way in the novel of Alexandre Dumas the count of Assembles-Cristo where the count bribes an operator underpaid to transmit a false message.

See too

Turn of Cap

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