The Chappe telegraph was a French semaphore telegraph system invented by Claude Chappe in the early 1790s. The system was composed of towers placed every 5 to 15 kilometers. Coded messages were sent from tower to tower, with transmission being handled by tower operators using specially designed telescopes.

2025年1月19日 · Claude Chappe was a French engineer and cleric who converted an old idea into a reality by inventing the semaphore visual telegraph. His brother Ignace Chappe (1760–1829), a member of the Legislative Assembly during the French Revolution, strongly supported Claude’s proposal for a visual signal.

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.

Claude Chappe (1763-1805) invented a semaphore visual telegraph. The lines between cities were composed by a series of towers (stations), 10-15 km apart, equipped with a pair of telescopes and a semaphore which beams were permitted discrete angular positions. These positions were assigned to numeric symbols in connection with a code book.

2024年3月29日 · As head of the new Telegraph Administration, Claude oversaw the construction of over 500 telegraph towers covering 3000+ miles by 1805. The impact of the network was immense. The French government could transmit orders and receive intelligence almost instantaneously compared to the past.

2024年12月21日 · In 1893, at the first centennial of the telegraph, a bronze monument of Claude Chappe was erected in Paris (see the upper image), at the crossroad of boulevards Raspail and Saint-Germain, near the Rue du Bac, where Chappe had his first workshop.

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeded in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph.