Napoleon has the cable telegraph
 

How much is the development of a telegraph system one of mechanical engineering that needs to be worked on, and how much one of an idea that hasn't yet been thought about or deployed ? Given that Napoleon had a very effective semaphore-based telegraph that allowed Paris to communicate to the fleet in a short-time delay, there is the basis of a design there. How much needs to be done to advance this to the cable ?

Grey Wolf

From one reference: Samuel Soemmering (Prussia) develops a multiwire telegraph in 1809.

another entry:

1796 Francisco Salva installs an electric telegraph linking Madrid to Aranjuez, Spain a distance of 50k (30 miles); the link consists of 44 wires that allow 22 characters to be transmitted; the signals are generated by electrostatic machines and detected by people holding the ends of the wires; later Salva uses the occurance of sparks to detect signals.

From The Timetables of Technology

Power
 

Napoleon needs a better power source than the electrostatic machines he had. Some decent insulators wouldn't hurt, and an electromagnet for output.

Was the heliograph available to Napoleon? Use of it during that critical moment at Waterloo could have turned the battle, though I believe it was cloudy that day.

Solresol
 

Jean François Sudre (1787-1864) invented a means of long-distance communcation in 1817, which he named Solresol. This language is based on the musical scale and has just seven syllables: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. Statistically, these combinations yield seven one-syllable words, 49 of two syllables, 336 of three, 2,268 of four, 9,072 of five, for a total of 11,732 primary words, a respectable vocabulary in any language. Shifts of stress from one syllable to another yielded additional words and separate grammatical forms. The language could be sung, played, or hummed, as well as spoken. It could be written as music. It could be expressed in taps, or even colors. Solresol gained wide acceptance, and was sponsored by such figures as Victor Hugo, Lamartine, von Humboldt, and Napoleon III.

Here's an example:

rml rdd lsorf ldld = Donnez un mètre de mousseline.

It had particular value to the military in this period, as it could be broadcast over long distances by a loud-enough military band. Some of you may have heard a snatch or two of Solresol - it was used in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind as the language that the alien spacecraft uses to communicate.

If Sudre had pioneered his language only a few years earlier, it would have been available to Napoleon. He could have established broadcast centers all over the continent relatively quickly.

Could semaphores + telescopes have worked, especially as a network?

Fortunately for the British, when Napoleon was shown & offered models of the first steam ships, propellor ships and breech loading rifles & artillery, he showed no interest in technical innovation whatsoever!

Chapp Telegraph.

In use in France during the Revolution and Empire.

The first two were, IMO, significant mistakes.

The later two, I'm not sure. Were they developped enougth to be mass producted in a reliable fashion. I think metallurgy still has some progress to make befor this happens.

OTOH, if Napoleon were to adopt the Minié Ball with rifled muskets, Wellinhgton's thin red line may have some trouble holding, where he cannot use the reverse slope tactic.

So, reading between the lines the problem is not so much in the cables or character-generation per se, but in the source of electricity ? Is one therefore requiring Napoleon to have better electricity than historical ? I hadn't even thought of this - how much did early electricity owe to fortune and conceptual breakthroughs, and how much to the measurable march of technology ?

Grey Wolf

Of course, bear in mind that the British didn't adopt those either at this point.

OK, so what do the electric bits do ? Could it be done with any other power source ?

Grey Wolf