Communication

mail and telegraph.

I grew up using both. I can tell you most people never needed to communicate with anyone from out of town. The poor would spend their whole lives within just a few square miles. They only moved if they had to get jobs elsewhere. In which case they rarely wrote as most poor people were illiterate. For the educated mail was pretty much the exclusive means of long distance communication.

The telegraph was usually reserved for official business. Later on when it became cheaper it was used by more people, but even then it was an expense to be avoided if possible. Telegraph and mail were both priced by distance. 1000 miles would be pretty expensive and you wouldn't want to know too many people that far away. The mail was vastly more useful since you could wait to write until you had a package and send it all together.

Until the arrival of the train, when people started traveling faster than mail, there was rarely a need for fast communication. In fact the only times I had to resort to telegraph was to tell people when my train will be arriving. Obviously a letter would not arrive in time.

Things are better now.
 
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There were military heliographs in Napoleon's time, and beacon posts too, so there IS a way to communicate very fast from one specific spot to another. Its not very flexible, and obviously with a beacon system it can only signal one thing (ie lit means invasion or whatever) tho the heliograph was more flexible and Napoleon was able to send orders to Ganteaume at Rochefort with it from Paris

Telegraphs developed alongside the railways, and were often built in with the rail network. There were also moving telegraph stations on trains

There is scope for early technology using telegraph - a sort of fax system existed in France in the 1860s and IIRC some versions could handle pictures

There was also carrier pigeons for the army

But if you wanted to physically move around, say to visit London from the provinces you could either take the mail coach or go by ship (the latter being a hell of a lot quicker from Scotland). Canals were used for travel in co-ordination with mail coaches for central England

Post horses and livery stables also existed


Cat !
 
How did people communicate over 100 miles and 1,000 miles in 1850 and 1890? I'd just like to know.

Immediately, or just sending a message?

Semaphore stations - the Admiralty had a chain of stations from Portsmouth to London; telegraph; the postal service; horse messenger; the train.
 
Beacon towers were a possibility , although this technology was pretty outdated even by the 1850s. Id stick with riders in the 1850s , and telepraph to all the major continents by the late 1890s
 
How the hell old are you?:eek:
In x-USSR telegraph was very alive and kicking until late 1980s (especially if we're talking about smallish towns and countryside where phone system was weak or didn't exist at all). It was kind of "guaranteed next day message delivery" system, as message had to be delivered from telegraph office to addressee within 24 hours from being received. Speaking about snail mail... Well, some my senior relatives (70+ yo) still use snail mail. They claim it's different feeling to write on paper. Although, once mail is complete, they hand it over to their children or grandchildren, who use scanner and e-mail to send the message to addressee's offspring, who print it and give a letter to addressee :)
 
Thank you.

Any more information on the telegraph system in France, so I could have something to go on before researching and learning more about it?
 
Basically, in 1850 and 1890, the question was still very much which 100 or 1000 miles. Communication infrastructure was static and capital-intensive. As a result, communicating along much-used avenues was often quick and convenient while getting in touch with out-of-the-way places could be incredibly demanding in terms of resources and time.

Communicating over the 100 miles between, say, London and Birmingham or Paris and Le Havre even in 1850 would, bar the absence of the telephone, have looked very similar to the way it did until the 1990s - you posted a letter and it would be delivered the next morning. If things were very urgent, you could send a telegram which took only hours. Of course, once we're talking about a different kind of 100 miles - say between Gdansk and Warsaw, or Yaroslav and Vologda - you'de be looking at several days' transit time and not necessarily daily postal services or telegraph, and the connection between Boma and Maquela might give you half a year's turnaround time if you paid for a messenger and his armed escort.

By 1890, the infrastructure had expanded to the point that almost any urban centre was reachable within a few days at most from its 100-mile periphery, and most postal services would deliver overnight over such distances. THere were, of course, many areas where communication was still as fast as a messenger could walk, but the greater part of the Western world had become postalised them.

Communication over 1000 miles in 1850 meant that you either had some kind of sea route, or were looking at very lengthy travel times. You could already post international letters, but it was complicated and expensive and the journey from, say, London to Rome or Paris to St Petersburg took weeks. And that was in the middle of civilised Europe. Telegraphs over that distance were just being pioneered and as yet, there was no regular service. Sending a message from, say, Port Banana to (the future site of) Stanleyville might well require several years' hard work to assemble an expedition, stockpile the trade goods, hire guides and negotiate passage.

By 1890, international and deep-sea telegraphs were established technology and fast mail steamers plied all major routes, with travel times between Europe and America cut to under ten days. You could send a message from London to Simlah or San Francisco and have an answer the same day (again, the infrastructure only gopes so far - a telegram from London to a tiny village in Darjeeling would take a few hours to within 100 or so miles of its destination and then several days by post runner). I have a lovely little detail-obsessed pocket atlas printed in 1890 that claims that within five days, you (and your mail) could reach Moscow, Constantinople, Naples, Gibraltar, Stockholm or Bergen from London.- Within ten days, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Aden, Arkhangelsk and Sierra Leone, within twenty San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Capetown, Delhi, Madras, Tobolsk and Vancouver. Within fourty days, a letter could be in anwhere but the polar region, northern Siberia, Central Africa, Central Asia, inner Australia and non-coastal South America. Even the upper Amazon is marked as '30 to 40 days'. So you're looking at remarkably good communication from a purely technical point of view. Of course it was still quite costly and not something people did frivolously.

If you are interested, you might want to read 'The Victorian Internet'. A fascinating history of the telegraph.
 
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