Optical telegraph: before Wi-Fi, France built an internet with sticks and stones

As we have once told here, before fiber optics and satellites there existed a kind of nineteenth-century Internet made of sticks and erected on stones: the network of optical telegraphs. The invention is attributed to Claude Chappe, although as in all technological novelty authorship is the subject of debate, with Robert Hooke and other people there swarming. This ingenious visual communication system of post-revolutionary France allowed sending…