Images

Telegraph

Telegraph

Prerequisites

Requires:

• Electro-Magnetism

Statistics

Gives:

• Listening Post
• Stadium

Gameplay

The telegraph makes it possible to receive information faster than a man can ride or walk. Thus, it makes it possible for Listening Posts to give advance warning of enemy movements near your borders. On the homefront, the Stadium gives your citizens a place to watch sporting events, giving them a way of forming a tribal bond with their fellow urban denizens through the shared support of their city’s team.

Historical

The ancient Persian Empire used fire signals to transmit information from hill to hill, and the ancient Britons seem to have had a similar system of hilltop ’signal posts’ to warn of invasion by smoke or fire signaling. During the Napoleonic Wars, an extensive system of ’telegraph towers’ using colored ball signals transmitted information to Paris from all over France and French-allied Europe. All of these long distance signals were rendered obsolete by the application of electricity to information transmission. In 1831 John Henry in Albany actually demonstrated the first electromagnetic telegraph, but he never developed the device. Between 1832 and 1843 Samuel F. B. Morse did such development, demonstrating the first telegraph messaging in 1843. By 1856 telegraph lines were all over Europe, so that ministers in Paris and London could send messages directly to generals in the Crimea: one French general complained that it was "like being on the paralyzing end of an electric wire". The telegraph was particularly important for the development of the railroad: control of multiple trains sharing the same track would have been suicidally dangerous except for the telegraph lines that paralleled the tracks and helped stations keep track of the trains.