How Did People Send Messages Before Phones?
Before phones, people sent messages with smoke signals, beacon fires and talking drums, then with couriers, horses, pigeons and ships. Public postal services appeared in the early 1500s, and the electric telegraph of 1837 finally made messages almost instant.
How did people send messages before writing?
They used signals that could be seen or heard from far away. By covering and uncovering a fire, people sent puffs of smoke in different patterns. Many ancient civilisations built beacon chains, rows of signal fires on hilltops or towers: one tower lit its fire, the next saw it and lit theirs, and so on. Across West Africa, drummers beat out rhythms on talking drums that sounded like the words of their spoken language and could be heard from kilometres away.
Key facts
- A horse at full gallop could reach 65 km/h, five times faster than a person on foot.
- Carrier pigeons were used from around 1300 BCE until the 20th century.
- The first public postal service began in the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1500s.
What made messages instant?
Electricity. In 1837, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail built an early electric telegraph that sent short and long pulses, dots and dashes, down a wire. This became known as Morse code. By 1866 a cable lay across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and a message from London could reach New York in minutes. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the telephone.
Where can I read the full story?
This is a short version of “Messages Before Phones” from OYLA Junior #11. The full article in OYLA Junior follows the whole journey in pictures, from smoke signals on the Great Wall of China to the first telephone.
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