Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
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Seems to me it wouldn't be too hard to rig up a higher-bit night version of the Optel. What about using colored filters over the lamps? Red, green, blue, and white are all easily distinguishable from each other, and depending on how far apart the towers are they might be able to distinguish orange, yellow and purple too, they they might be confused for red, white, and bkue at longer distances. That's at least four bits though.
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Thande
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You would think so, but apparently when Chappe tried it in OTL it was harder to distinguish from a distance than you'd think. Lack of powerful lights might well be an issue: remember in this era, before electricity, the only really powerful source of artificial light was limelight, which was rather hazardous. Gaslamps might fix the problem in urban centres, but supplying them with gas would be problematic for the cross-country Optel lines.
This is really cool stuff. I hadn't actually known much, if anything, about OTL semaphore technology, or its relation to Braille, so reading about it here is quite interesting.
The one thing that caught my attention, though, is the number of distinguishable signals you mention for the first-gen Optel towers. Wouldn't it be 9, rather than six? (Left up, Right up/horizontal/down; Left horizontal, Right up/horizontal/down; Left down, Right up/horizontal/down.) I expect they would then have to pare back the signal set once they developed shutterbox Optel, but first gen would seem to fit a 3x3 system, rather than a 2x3.
Thande
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Ah, you're quite correct - well spotted, I'll change the text.
In OTL I don't think they used horizontal arm signals due to the way the central beam was mounted (they instead angled the central beam for more signals), so I wasn't basing that off anything real, hence the mistake.
Also, while looking up stuff, I found this awesome map of France's OTL optical semaphore network, showing the lines built between 1792 and 1852 (when electric telegraphs displaced them).
Quite impressive to see the alternate development of technologies : optical telegraphy didn't quite have the same impact in our 19th century.
I wonder what I could recognise in this Paris : probably not much, some churches that Lisieux didn't destroy and some things like the place des Voges.
I find the map really funny because it shows that the trends in France are quite the same : everything goes to Paris and there is nothing in the Massif Central.
I wonder what I could recognise in this Paris : probably not much, some churches that Lisieux didn't destroy and some things like the place des Voges.
I find the map really funny because it shows that the trends in France are quite the same : everything goes to Paris and there is nothing in the Massif Central.
And some observant people would note that contrary to popular belief, in several respects California would actually be surprisingly Diversitarian in nature?
Hey, I have to ask this. Every time I come across these references I get the impression that you have the entire history of this world worked out in perfect detail. How much is fuzzy for you and gradually, as you get there, you end up changing radically, and how much is perfect and clear in your mind?
For example, disregarding the fact that you obviously won't give away spoilers, would you hypothetically be able to give a reasonably detailed description of how the world of Look to the West looks in, say, the year 1969?
I can't help but find this a bit curious, as I would expect a team of engineers to be capable of figuring out such a thing. I already have a crude idea myself. The only problem, such as I can see it, is that moving those plates around must be at least kind of heavy and require some force, lest you want them to be so light that a reasonably windy day could clog up the communication networks of the entire country.
...but then again you do have steam engines around since even earlier than OTL...
I'll send you a sketch tomorrow showing my idea, actually.
Yeah, while I know you don't think highly of the Difference Engine, this sounds really Difference Engine-ey!
Thande
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It's much more the fuzzy side of things; I try not to be too definitive about specifics because I come up with new ideas as I go along. For example, literally ten minutes ago I finally thought up a way to introduce a certain world-changing technology in the 20th century, a question which I puzzled over for literally years, and will now end up happening about twelve years earlier than I had vaguely envisaged up to now.
It's supposed to be a logistical thing rather than a purely engineering issue--they got a mechanism working, but when it broke down, there weren't enough trained personnel in the tower to repair it as before and overall there was a unacceptable drop in average transmission rate as a result.
(No, this was not inspired by how botched automation in supermarkets and railway stations these days as an excuse to fire workers ends up making everything three times as inefficient as before, he said unconvincingly, still bitterly clutching his missed train ticket from earlier today
)Sounds interesting...
It's more that I haven't read it, and just have the kneejerk hipster suspicion that all published AH must be jazzed up to appeal to the unwashed massesYeah, while I know you don't think highly of the Difference Engine, this sounds really Difference Engine-ey!
You have to add a footnote explaining this process on the mechanism in question when you eventually get around to writing the Twentieth Century.
It's supposed to be a logistical thing rather than a purely engineering issue--they got a mechanism working, but when it broke down, there weren't enough trained personnel in the tower to repair it as before and overall there was a unacceptable drop in average transmission rate as a result.
(No, this was not inspired by how botched automation in supermarkets and railway stations these days as an excuse to fire workers ends up making everything three times as inefficient as before, he said unconvincingly, still bitterly clutching his missed train ticket from earlier today
Oh, right.
Forgot it was a technical possibility for things to get broken.
But then again, I'm a physicist, not an engineer.
Must be rather frustrating when the signalling mechanism breaks down and the only means of long-distance communication is the broken machinery that's the problem in the first place.
I guess you could have a red flag or something standing outside the tower and raise that when the machinery breaks down and have the other towers signal this to a repair-man who is in charge of a couple of towers in a specific district or something. Or you could simply have the guy with the telescope be a trained repair-man as well, but then again, that would go against the idea of "the right man for the right job" philosophy of these towers if one guy is to "multitask"...
Thande
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Terry Pratchett's version of this, which was what got me interested in semaphore history in the first place, was to have damaged towers send up a signal flare rocket to alert the two towers on either side, which would then transmit a distress signal to the nearest regional headquarters and it would send out repair teams and perhaps even a temporary portable replacement semaphore apparatus on wheels so transmission throughput could resume while the repairs are taking place. Which is realistic enough, but my thought here was that trying to make a tower work with too few people would mean that problems that, with the old setup, were minor enough to be fixed without calling for external repair teams, would now require them and this would result in delays and a drop in efficiency.
Sounds like a fair enough argument.
Which brings me to my other question, have you found any figures on how fast messages used to travel in OTL by semaphore towers, and have you managed to make any extrapolation of the "bandwidth" of this more efficient Optel technology?
Thande
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Sadly not, I'd appreciate it if anyone does come across any such information. Maybe I should look on JSTOR now I have a university account again.
First time commentator on this thread. I'd binged on LttW during a recent drought between posts, and didn't want to bump the thread with a comment.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I've really enjoyed this timeline so far. It's got a good sense of forward movement in the narrative, and the world is well-drawn. I also liked how the structure of each volume has reflected the story being told. Volume II and III in particular were very different beasts. The Popular Wars, as several in-universe authors noted, was just a label attributed to a lot of unrelated conflicts, and it came across as exactly that way in the narrative. Volume III read like an anthology rather than the epic nature of Volume II.
Not sure what else to say except to keep up the good work.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I've really enjoyed this timeline so far. It's got a good sense of forward movement in the narrative, and the world is well-drawn. I also liked how the structure of each volume has reflected the story being told. Volume II and III in particular were very different beasts. The Popular Wars, as several in-universe authors noted, was just a label attributed to a lot of unrelated conflicts, and it came across as exactly that way in the narrative. Volume III read like an anthology rather than the epic nature of Volume II.
Not sure what else to say except to keep up the good work.
Thande
Donor
Thank you very much, I appreciate the comments. The different nature of II and III was half deliberate and half just how it turned out: it was possible to turn the Jacobin Wars into a coherent narrative by shunting contemporaneous events in the rest of the world elsewhere (I didn't catch up on China for quite a while) but the interconnectedness of the Popular Wars meant that this was impossible.
A thought that occurred on reading some of the comments on the latest update (which was great, by the way - I was wondering if Brunel Sr. might show up in TTL...) - have you heard of the Liverpool-Holyhead Optical Telegraph? It used a similar kind of system to Chappe, and it was claimed it could send a message 100 miles in 27 seconds. There's at least one book out there about it, but given it was published by Avid getting hold of it outside of Merseyside may be like collecting rocking horse dung...
Alex Richards
Donor
They actually did a test of that once, It's quicker to do a relay by OpTel than to do a similar relay by Text Message
Thande
Donor
Yes, but not in exactly the same way of course. There were a number of social reformers over this period (some of whom blind themselves) who worked to give blind people more dignity in society, i.e. not being mocked Bedlam-style as was common before the mid-18th century, and to give them employment. This happened over a number of years, e.g. at one point it was progressive to give blind people textiles jobs in basket-weaving (because it's mainly tactile) but later on, that became so stereotypically associated with them (and dead-end) that new reformers looked for ways to let them pursue more aspirational goals. The main reason I know some stuff about this is due to 1) Doncaster's association with the deaf education movement--not the same obviously but some crossover; 2) David Blunkett; 3) My dad having worked with blind colleagues in the Employment Service many moons ago. I still have a Braille typewriter stashed away somewhere, which I was mentally picturing when I was thinking of the six-dot Derrault Optel mechanism.Love the detail and the complex story behind them. Cool how he was trying to give the blind some dignified work.
I hadn't heard of that one; the only British semaphore system I know a lot about is the one along the south coast they used in the Napoleonic Wars. That's very interesting and potentially useful. The details of the code indicate that, like many telegraph systems at the time, it was designed with quite a limited vocabulary of common words plus the ability to painstakingly spell out the occasional word that didn't have its own code. This is reasonable for a purely military system or one intended to alert a port about incoming ships, but the difference with the improved Chappe/Derrault system in LTTW is that it is primarily set up to spell out individual words, like the later electric telegraph in OTL, with preset common code words being secondary. This is a consequence of the more advanced technology and setup making transmission faster.
That's a cool statistic! It also gives me ideas for something I'm pondering for a future segment about technology.They actually did a test of that once, It's quicker to do a relay by OpTel than to do a similar relay by Text Message
That certainly is impressive, even for the most unsophisticated messages (such as, "We're being attacked!"). Kind of like the Great Wall of China. Or the Beacons of Gondor.
(Which by the way is something that always has bothered me with that truly majestic scene. Considering that in the movie it took Gandalf and Pippin c:a twenty-four hours to reach Minas Tirith from Edoras, should it really take c:a twenty-four hours to simply send the one single message you can send via the Beacons-of-Gondor-network ("We call for aid!")? Plus, if it takes approximately the same time to send the single message you can send over the BOG-network between its two ends as it takes to send a messanger (who can actually carry with him or her details as to the aid-callers' strategical and logistical situation), what's the point of investing so much time and money on keeping all those people stationed up on remote mountain stations continuously given how extremely rare it is that the BOG-network is used anyway? And considering that Denethor (at least in the movie) is against using the BOG-network at all, why isn't he simply telling the equivalent of the Gondorian Minister of Defense to begin deconstructing the entire thing? Hell, at the other end, it would appear that the government is pretty skeptical of making use of it in their time of distress as well. Is it set up as some sort of a jobs programme to stimulate the Gondorian and Rohanian economies at a time of malaise or something? This does not make sense!)
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