Telegraphy

Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of textual or symbolic (as opposed to verbal or audio) messages without the physical exchange of an object bearing the message.

Telegraphy has been around for a very long time. It was used a long the Great Wall of China via smoke signals to pass along information about invaders. Similarly Native Americans used this technique to build an advantage during battles and attacks. Can you start to see how information is power?

Chappes Semaphore

In the 1790s the Chappes brothers started building something like a semaphore line during the French revolution to speed up communication as they were surrounded by many opposing forces. Semaphores were an improvement over smoke signals in that they were faster and didn’t depend on fuel. They also helped communicate faster than reflecting light.

Around 1800, the electrical telegraph system started to form. This was 30x more efficient than using semaphores and also had a lot higher scaling potential. Semaphores were limited by line of sight, electricity is not.

Sömmering’s electric telegraph in 1809

The electrical telegraph system was still complex. There was a wire for each letter in the alphabet and whichever leads sparked on the other side were the letters being sent.

Enter software! In 1836 Sam Morse started working on a language to speed transmission of natural language through the electrical telegraphy system. Initially the only numbers were transmitted and then translated to letters with an “ask key” system…(sorry I couldn’t resist). Morse code + electronic went wireless in 1890! You could even transmit messages from air ships!

So here we are in just a few hundred years we’ve gone from building giant bon fires every few miles and trying to light them in the rain to expensive semaphore lines, down to transmitting over hundreds of miles using electricity and customized software.

From here we roll into the first and second world wars and communication and technology sky rockets. Satellites, oceanic fiber, 802.11…twitter…snapchat…(might be sliding backwards now). Companies were willing to spend millions of dollars to run fiber to get just a couple millisecond advantage in data access to stock exchanges(NPR).

Communicating over distance has been a huge part of our world for a long time. Working remotely is essentially giving instruction, direction, warning or any other kind of information to someone that isn’t right next to you. It might also be sharing an idea or comparing information to decide what is the best course of action.

Yoda Meme

If you come into a position of leadership, it’s very easy to have the desire to need physical control of your followers. Later as a leader progresses they learn to delegate and how not to micromanage, how to give their followers clear vectors of work, sharing vision and many more things that all comprise great leadership. In the end it may be that that physical, local control is actually holding leaders back and forcing them to take the long road to becoming great.

The reality is that we’ve been working while being distributed across vast distances for a very long time, it’s actually something that we’ve always found value in and I think we’re just beginning to realize the potential with our current tools in this digital age. When there’s no one around me I’m still only a few clicks or taps away at any time, day or night.

Great leaps in our advancement have come from people with different experiences from distance places sharing their ideas and views on some given topic. Communication channels have and will continue to decrease the distance and increase the ability for people to express their ideas clearly.

If smoke signals gave people huge advantages hundreds of years ago, imagine what terabytes of information traveling at the speed of light can do for us today. Ideas and people around the world have never been so close and so able to share their ideas.