this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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I'm honestly surprised people didn't come up with that long before electronic communication. And once they started, people started figuring ways to compress the transmitted data. And for a world full of magic, clacks didn't take magic! Much like today, give a thousand autists keyboards and let them rock out.
They did. But then railways arrived and electrical communication became possible and necessary.
Not so much the clacks, but flag semaphore towers were a thing long before the electric telegraph was invented. Infact, the term "Telegraph" predates the device we all think by several centuries.
And there are some pretty awesome systems, like the Chappe telegraph which is about 50 years older than the electric telegraph and had hundreds of kilometers of line between french cities, venice and Amsterdam when people started building electric systems.
The downside is that you need at least one operator per tower, every 10 or so kilometers, even if nobody lives there.