The Chappe Telegraph: How France Invented the Internet of 1792

Long before the electric telegraph, revolutionary France built the world's first optical telecommunications network. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the Chappe telegraph — a system of semaphore towers that could send a message from Paris to Lille in under 30 minutes. We meet Claude Chappe, the inventor whose brothers helped him convince the National Convention that speed could save the Republic. Along the way, we touch on the Battle of Condé-sur-l'Escaut, where the telegraph first proved its military worth; the rivalry with the Abbé Mical's acoustic telegraph; and the cultural shock of a machine that could "think" faster than a horse. We also look at how Napoleon used the network to coordinate his empire, and how private companies later exploited it for commodity prices — a precursor to the stock ticker. The episode closes with the last surviving Chappe tower in France and asks whether optical telegraphy was a dead end or the seed of our connected world. #ChappeTelegraph #ClaudeChappe #FrenchRevolution #Semaphore #OpticalTelegraph #NationalConvention #Napoleon #BattleOfCondé #HistoryOfTechnology #Telecommunications #ParisLille #AbbéMical #StockTicker #18thCentury #Europe #France #History #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo