Claude Chappe
Claude Chappe
Born	December 25, 1763 Brûlon, Sarthe
Died	January 23, 1805 Paris
Nationality	France
Work
Significant projects	semaphore system
Significant advance	telecommunications

Claude Chappe (December 25, 1763 – January 23, 1805) was a French inventor who in 1792 demonstrated a practical semaphore system that eventually spanned all of France. This was the first practical telecommunications system of the industrial age, making Chappe the first telecom mogul with his "mechanical internet."^[1]

Life[link]

Chappe was born in Brûlon, Sarthe, France, the grandson of a French baron. He was raised for church service, but lost his sinecure during the French Revolution. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen.^[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.

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 first called his invention the "tachygraph", which means fast writer. A friend suggested a name meaning a far writer, telegraph.^[1]

In 1792, the first messages were successfully sent between Paris and Lille.^[3] 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.^[3]

In 1805, Claude Chappe committed suicide in Paris by throwing himself down a well at his hotel.^[4] 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.

In 1846, the government of France committed to a new system of electric telegraph lines. Many contemporaries warned of the ease of sabotage and interruption of service by cutting a wire. With the emergence of the electric telegraph, slowly the Chappe telegraph ended in 1852.^[3]

Popular culture[link]

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

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Beyer, Rick, The Greatest Stories Never Told, A&E Television Networks / The History Channel, ISBN 0-06-001401-6

External links[link]

• French article: Les Télégraphes Chappe, l'Ecole Centrale de Lyon
• French article: Le télégraphe aérien, in Les merveilles de la science, de Louis Figuier, t. 2, pages 20-68
• Italian article: Francesco Frasca, Il telegrafo ottico dalla Rivoluzione francese alla guerra di Crimea, in Informazioni della Difesa, n°1, 2000, Roma: Stato Maggiore della Difesa, pp. 44-51

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