Before Phones Pt 2: The Surprising Ways Humans Sent Messages

SPEAKER_01 0:00 Ahoy and welcome back to what we did before. Today we're taking a deeper look into the time before phones. In this episode, we're going to be starting in recent memory from the advent of landline telephones and how this invention shaped some of the most popular words in our language. Ahoy. To some of the surprising methods that we used for long-distance communication in the past, including war pigeons and shell horns. I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before, the podcast charting the history of modern inventions. So, Matt, picking up where we left off in the world of Nokia bricks, uh, landlines in the hallway, phone books thick enough to stop a door, that kind of thing. Yeah, but still not thick enough to not be ripped apart by you. Yeah, you can you can say I'm a hulking mighty mammoth sentinel of a man. But I digress. Um before mobile phones, we had landlines, of course. But while many don't have them in our houses anymore, we should probably appreciate just how insane in their own right these devices were and are, and what a game changer this was for the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:13 Yeah, absolutely. We we might see landlines as kind of um obsolete tech in some ways now, but they were the staple of every house, so much so that this modern idea of not having a landline phone still kind of feels a bit weird to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:31 Yeah, what's really weird is that they just have this short spell in history where they were like relevant and then they just got usurped very quickly, and we'll discover that that happens quite a lot in the history of communication once you reach a certain threshold. But you know, we're talking about our experience in the 90s and 2000s, you wired telephones were sort of peak technology and adoption by then, but they really weren't around for that long.

SPEAKER_00 1:56 I know. So this image that we have uh from our childhood where the landline telephone was just, you know, in everyone's house. Um, this image is this device with buttons for the numbers rather than the rotary dial. Maybe it had like answering machines, call waiting. You could do long distance calls, even if they were a bit expensive. This was kind of the peak of this technology.

SPEAKER_01 2:25 Yeah, but all of those things that you've just mentioned, they were super new concepts in the grand scheme of things, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:31 Yeah, yeah. I mean, back in the sort of sixties and seventies, we were only just starting to use push-button phones. Almost all phones before then used a rotary dial.

SPEAKER_01 2:42 Yeah, so you had to spin a dial and wait for it to rotate back for each number. Um, it's which is hilarious because we think texting on an old mobile phone is irritating. That must have just been infuriating. I used to weirdly have nightmares where I just was trying to dial a phone number on an old phone and just could never get it right and just had to keep on redialing it. Um anyway. Uh and then something called dual-tone multi-frequency was invented, which allowed push-button telephones to be uh, well, to be a possibility. So the reason the rotary phones were originally needed was that each number would generate an electrical pulse for a very precise amount of time, which is something difficult to emulate when you've just got push buttons.

SPEAKER_00 3:25 Yeah, that's right. I mean, in modern day you could emulate that, but the sort of timing circuits you'd need back then were quite tricky to do. So obviously, if you've ever used one of these rotary phones, you turn the dial and then it turns back sort of a a very precise amount of time. Um, you couldn't really do that with a push button, you'd have to hold the button or have some timing uh going on electronically. And anyway, this dual-tone multi-frequency or DTMF, if you've ever worked in a call center or worked on systems around them, you've maybe heard this term. It's a smart system of sort of sending a signal of two simultaneous tones, like a low tone and a high tone when you press the button. And you hear this, right, when you dial and you hear beep, beep, beep, beep, uh, and they're all different. And the combination is unique to every button that you press, so the receiver can tell which number you pressed.

SPEAKER_01 4:24 And this technology, well, it's the foundation that enabled those annoying menus that we know and love. You know, press one for customer service, press two to be passed on to an operator, press three for. Well, usually by the time you get to three, you sort of nod it off and you've got to start all over again.

SPEAKER_00 4:41 Yeah, and there's normally menus within menus, and then you're inevitably put on hold after pressing all those buttons.

SPEAKER_01 4:48 Yeah, and sometimes you get to the point where you uh you know it so well that you can just press the numbers before the voice on the other end says which number to press because you've just done it so many times. It's like, yes, I know it's one followed by a two, followed by a seven. Um and then obviously you get terrible screechy hold music that plays in your ear and makes you even more irritated by the whole experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:11 Yeah, and interestingly, that might not have been the experience for people back in the day. So landline phone call quality in general has degraded significantly over time. Degraded. Yeah, degraded. So you'd think that it would get better with technology, and in some ways, maybe it has, but actually, as adoption of this tech grew, we tried to fit more and more signals into existing infrastructure. And the degradation comes from kind of aggressive digital compression that's also quite poor quality compression because it needed to be compressed and decompressed quickly with old technology. And also phone networks were uh found ways to kind of fit more phone calls into one line by intentionally filtering out frequencies that are not typically used for human speech. So instead of using the full range of, I don't know, zero hertz to kind of 20,000 hertz or so, it was something like 200 to like 3000 hertz. Um, and unfortunately, a lot of those frequencies are used for music to sound good. Uh-huh. So the more that they wanted to get out of the available bandwidth they had with their infrastructure, the more frequencies were cut. So it's actually possible in the early days that music and voices actually may have sounded incredibly natural and good down the the phone.

SPEAKER_01 6:43 Yeah, that makes so much sense now when I'm listening to hold music and it's just this complete like blur of noises. It's just it just sounds like a cacophony of horrible sounds, and you think, I know, I know what tune this is meant to be, and there's just something something has been stripped away from it, and it really has. You know, our ears um could have been saved so much pain if we just stuck to the original way of doing things and kept it natural, right? Yeah. Um but but the problem was before we started doing this, the analog phone signals were really prone to static and electric interference. So we had a full spectrum of sound, but it would have been quite noisy. So digital signals, poor quality compression, and reduction in usable frequency bands for a phone call did allow phone companies to get more and more use out of the infrastructure they had. But it also just solved some very real problems that would have been difficult or even impossible to solve otherwise.

SPEAKER_00 7:39 Yes. And um actually Tom Scott did an amazing video about this a few years ago called Um Hold Music Used to Sound Better, Here's Why. And it's it's really interesting if you want to learn more about this, if you're a nerd like me.

SPEAKER_01 7:56 Um so we've just touched on this idea of analog phones before digital. And that this switch happened in about the 1960s when they developed a means of converting analog voice into digital samples.

SPEAKER_00 8:10 It's it seems amazing that we're talking about digital audio in the 1960s. You'd think that that's something that would be way more modern.

SPEAKER_01 8:19 Yeah, exactly. And this digital standard, well, it's still in use today, which seems crazy. So digital transmission allowed us to not only cram more calls into a single phone line, but it also allowed more and more automated phone exchanges.

SPEAKER_00 8:34 Yeah, yeah. And while they were still around afterwards in a different capacity, phone operators at these exchanges were a much, much bigger profession before the 1960s.

SPEAKER_01 9:47 Yeah, I so I this was always like anathema to me because this didn't exist in our childhood, but you've you've seen it in old TV shows and things like that when they use the phone, they speak to the operator first. So, how did that all work?

SPEAKER_00 10:00 Well, yeah, it's the same for me. I didn't really know. I've seen the TV shows and I had to do a bit of research, uh, which you know, there's probably some people listening that are sort of gobsmacked that it's like, oh come on, don't you remember offended? Yes. But um, and it shows how quickly things change, right? That we can't even imagine speaking to it to an operator. So in the in the really early days, you didn't actually even need to dial a number. You just lifted the handset of the phone in your house, and that would complete a circuit to an operator in the exchange, and they would see a light flash up on this board, and this board would just have loads of lights and uh sockets for chords to go into. So they would plug their chord into the line and they'd speak to you. They'd say, like, number, please, or who do you want to speak to? And you would ask the operator to connect you to either a number or even by name. So the exchanges could be so small that you could just say, please connect me to Mr. Smith. And then the operator would just take a chord and connect your line to Mr. Smith and send a ringing signal to them.

SPEAKER_01 11:15 That's bizarre because you'd think it would have to be the most massive exchange ever to fit enough operators in to take all of the phone calls that were coming in. If you were if you were doing that today, that's the case. But I imagine people were just making fewer phone calls back then.

SPEAKER_00 11:32 Yeah, I think also um they were split amongst sort of smaller uh exchanges. So if you had to do long-distance calls, and maybe our definition of a long-distance call is different to back then, I'm not sure, but uh an operator would have to call another exchange and potentially hop across multiple exchanges. So it could get quite complicated, and even depending on the actual distance of the call, it could take hours to connect you to where you wanted to go because one operator would have to call another exchange and say, look, we're trying to get to Japan.

SPEAKER_02 12:08 Can you?

SPEAKER_00 12:09 And they're like, Oh, we're in like Arkansas, okay. So you just keep going down the chain until you eventually get to the destination that you want to speak to. And then the person's like out doing the shopping or something.

SPEAKER_01 12:23 Yeah, that would be so annoying. Like, ah, can you call me back later? Oh, yeah, I'll call you back later, but you need to be in the house for at least the rest of the day to receive the call. It does put into perspective, doesn't it? You know, when WhatsApp is down, for instance, and we get really annoyed that we can't instantly video call someone thousands of miles away. But but let's talk about the really early days because phones weren't initially super popular, were they? Just like mobile phones weren't popular.

SPEAKER_00 12:51 Yeah, it's a really common theme, as we've seen with previous episodes. There's just a bit of inertia with inventions and new technologies. And I think something like this that relies on, you know, a network uh in particular. So the phone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, and people didn't really adopt them for a while. Uh, because one, you could only really call people who already had a phone, which most people didn't, and also the the infrastructure just barely existed.

SPEAKER_01 13:28 Yeah, exactly. We think like we you got phone lines pretty much everywhere, but that infrastructure couldn't possibly just spring up out of nowhere. That took time, it took investment. And a phone is pretty useless if there are no phone lines. Um, but then phone lines are useful if people aren't buying phones. So yeah, yeah, it's pretty it's tough to know when to start the investment chain. I it's amazing that they even began.

SPEAKER_00 13:51 I know, and um, it makes you think, doesn't it? Like if they were invented now, would they actually uh would would they take off? Because I always think this about cars. Like if somebody said, like, we have this thing, but you're gonna have to build enormous tarmac infrastructure and petrol stations everywhere. Oh, and by the way, they're pretty lethal and they go like 70 plus miles per hour. Um, and if you crash, you know, you might get injured or die. Yeah, it seems crazy that actually the world adopted and changed. And it's the same with phone lines. Like actually, when you look around and see, well, they might be underground or they might be above ground, but just the fact that we're all linked by this infrastructure. And these things were expensive to start with, not just the phones, but you know, the infrastructure. It was only as adoption accelerated that the price dropped and manufacturing also sort of scaled, and that brought the price down. So there's a statistic that by 1900 there were around 600,000 phones in the US, but by 1910, there were at least five million. So quite quite quick, not as quick as um mobile phones. Interestingly, now there's estimated to be 372 million cell phones alone, not not including uh landlines in the US. Just in the US. Yes. So I mean, if if you look at the world, it's gonna be billions. I mean, probably uh as many as there are people.

SPEAKER_01 15:29 So, yeah, you can imagine building up this infrastructure at scale and speed was an issue back then, but you can totally see why they tried to cram more signals into the lines that they had. And in some rural locations, it it just didn't make sense to give separate phone circuits to every household, you know, when there was just sort of 600,000 phones around. Um, so they would share a line. And this was actually called a party line. And the unfortunate side effect of this was that it relied solely on trust. So if your neighbor received a call, you could pick up your handset too and listen into the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 16:05 Yeah, I'm glad that's not a thing now. Uh, some of the neighbors that I've had in my life would definitely do that. They were so nosy, just looking over the fence, like, oh, what are you up to? They would definitely be listening in. Um, so when Alexander Graham Bell invented this thing, um, we just had to sort of imagine what the world would look like with it. Um, you know, we have this concept of phones and phone infrastructure, but this this was all just really fresh. And one of the things that they had to imagine was how you would answer a phone.

SPEAKER_01 16:41 Yeah. Now we sort of know the standard way of answering the phone is hello. But back then, um Alexander Graebell he tried to initially push for ahoy, hence why I said ahoy right at the start of this episode. Um, I would have pushed for a vast humatees, which would have been a great introduction to any phone call. Um and actually, this is why Mr. Burns in The Simpsons answers the phone with Ahoyhoy. It's not just a quirk of the show, but it's actually a joke at Mr. Burns' expense that he's like old enough to remember when that was the preferred greeting.

SPEAKER_00 17:16 And he must have been old because Thomas Edison pushed for the hello greeting we know and love today in 1877. Um, so uh people preferred that, and the rest is history. And actually, the telephone changed language itself here. In English, hello was not a particularly common greeting back then. It was mostly used to gain attention or as an exclamation, like, well, hello. Now, not only is it obviously a very standard greeting now, but other languages use a variation of this word to answer the phone now too.

SPEAKER_01 17:56 So if it wasn't for Thomas Edison, we might not be saying hello to each other right now. We might be saying ahoy or the um horrible suggestion in some early telephone manuals of uh what is wanted. It's so demanding, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 18:11 What is wanted? What is wanted?

SPEAKER_02 18:13 Oh god, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 18:15 Imagine answering the phone like that. We'd it might stop doing it. Yeah, yeah. I think in some ways I kind of want to do it, but like I think we would it might potentially change like culture and and politeness if if that had caught up. Yeah, if you answered every phone, what do you want? We suddenly get all like really but I guess what did we do before phones? That is the whole concept of this show, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:47 Yeah, well, we could meet up face to face. Ugh. Yeah, we could have genuine conversations in real life. Ugh. You know, those are those were a thing back then. Um, we might go to a local gathering if someone lived far away. Well, we just didn't speak to them until they visited us. Yeah, that's true. And we also wrote letters. Yeah, of course. And we will get onto letters shortly, but as we're working our way back from the modern day to ancient times, and there really are some cool ancient communication methods, so stick around to the end. But uh for now I think we should discuss the telegram. Yeah, and not the app. Not the app, no. These were messages sent on the telegraph system in the 1800s uh and to up to about the mid-1900s. So by transmitting messages via electrical wires, for the first time in history, messages could be sent long distances almost instantaneously.

SPEAKER_00 19:43 Yes. Um some people still do it now using Morse code, uh Samuel Morse's Morse code. Um so how it worked was someone would take their written message to a telegraph exchange and the operator would send it via Morse code. An operator on the other end would decipher the code and write the full message and deliver it to where it needed to go.

SPEAKER_01 20:05 Yeah, so they had to still deliver the message. So the final steps still needed a human to do it, like the manual delivery.

SPEAKER_00 20:12 Yes, so not so instantaneous, um, but pretty quick. Uh and obviously, if you were in the military or or if you just knew Morse code, then you could there was the potential for instantaneous communication. You see people on movies and stuff doing this, you know, with the um, I don't know what the machine's called, but where they're tapping long and short dots with their finger and thumb. But it yeah, pretty quick. Uh, way quicker than anything that they had before this, even if you had to rely on somebody to, you know, deliver the message. And the first official telegraph message was sent in 1844 between Washington, DC and Baltimore, and the message read, What hath God wrought?

SPEAKER_01 21:00 What hath God wrought indeed? Um, that was a pretty pretty good precursor to what God has now wrought with the smartphones. Um at least that message is a bit more uh cachet than our 2 a.m. you up messages today.

SPEAKER_00 21:19 Yeah. Uh well, you say our messages, um, I mean, well, we both are in long-term relationships, and both of us are old enough to not be awake at 2 a.m. Yeah. But teleph telegraph messages were quite expensive because they were charged per word. Uh people wrote extremely short messages as as a result. And this even influenced the creation of news headlines.

SPEAKER_01 21:48 Yeah, so we we kind of have telegrams to blame for clickbait and sensationalist journalism, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 21:54 Uh, sort of, yeah. And the there was then the the transatlantic telegraph system, and this used submarine cables. The first cable was laid in 1850 between Britain and France, but that failed almost immediately. And the the first reliable one was laid a a year later in 1851.

SPEAKER_01 22:18 Yeah, and um Queen Victoria actually got to test out a particularly monumental one in 1858. So it stretched from the UK all the way to the US. And she sent a message to the US President James Buchanan congratulating him on the completion of the cable project, uh, which is quite meta, isn't it? Um and it took a mere 16 hours to transmit.

SPEAKER_00 22:41 Wow. Okay, that's amazing. Um, and yeah, that's almost the foundations of the submarine cables that we rely on for internet today. Um, that's really interesting. And but it's also sort of basically the 16 hours no. It sounds crazy now. I mean, uh, we get annoyed if we have like a high ping between the UK and the US of 500 milliseconds or something. But it is basically nothing when you consider that just a few decades earlier it would have taken weeks by ship.

SPEAKER_01 23:17 Yeah, exactly. Um but as with anything where it's possible to intercept or miscommunicate because of the distances and all of the various things that were the processes that are involved in it not being completely instantaneous, things could go wrong. So there's actually one telegram that um is sort of partially blamed for starting a war. The M's dispatch was a telegram deliberately edited by Otto von Bismarck, and it helped spark the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. So Bismarck intentionally shortened and edited what was originally a polite diplomatic telegram to make it sound insulting to France. Then this telegram was published in newspapers, and France declared war soon after. Yeah, like a bad telegram is enough to spark a war. I mean, people just need to relax.

SPEAKER_00 24:14 Yeah, well, I was gonna say that we've maybe improved and uh we don't do these kind of things now, but I I'm not so sure in 2026. Um but if we take if we take a look a little bit further back, um news of Abraham Lincoln's assassination actually was spread by telegraph. So he was assassinated in 1865, and the telegraph carried the news across the US within hours. Um, this was the first time a major global event spread almost instantly, really, across a country. Just a few decades earlier, that would have taken days or weeks.

SPEAKER_01 24:57 Yeah, but there was actually another system that had been advancing communication technology before the telegraph, and that was the semaphore tower system. So by the 1700s, we had these tall towers equipped with mechanical arms, and operators could move the arms into different positions representing letters or words.

SPEAKER_00 25:18 Yeah, exactly. And now semaphores are used at sea, but also on land, and these were amazing. Chains of these towers allowed messages to travel hundreds of kilometers in just minutes. It was essentially like a visual internet before electricity.

SPEAKER_01 25:39 Yeah, so you'd have like whole chains of tool towers with people in each one looking out for the arms moving from one and basically like passing the message down the chain, so just replicating what they saw so the next person in the chain could see it.

SPEAKER_00 25:53 Yeah, you can totally imagine there's the potential for Chinese whispers this way. Um, if halfway down something, halfway down the chain something got misinterpreted. Actually, what you just um said about the telegram uh being deliberately changed, I can totally imagine, you know, halfway through the chain somebody interprets a message and is like, hmm. Just turns the arm into a big middle finger. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna I don't really like the tone of this one, I'm gonna change it. Um, yeah, you could you could have real power as somebody who was working in one of these towers. Yeah, true. Yeah, because they were being used um for some pretty uh major communications. We're not just talking about some communication over the span of a few meters or even kilometers, but the most famous semaphore system was invented by uh Claude Chapet. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but he's uh a French guy. Um, and this system had chains of tall towers placed sort of 10 to 20 kilometers apart. Each tower would receive the message from the previous and repeat it to the next, and it allowed messages to travel these huge distances in minutes. So, for example, a message could be sent from Paris to Lille, which is about 230 kilometres in just 10 to 15 minutes in 1792.

SPEAKER_01 27:21 Wow, that is actually genius. And they were used by the military, obviously, in France as well. So Napoleon Bonaparte used this huge system in France to send orders to armies across France for rapid military coordination, as well as for the government to send urgent messages for like things like news transmissions or state administration.

SPEAKER_00 27:43 And that's why that's why if you were in one of these towers, you did have some real power because these were important messages. And obviously there were limitations. Um, one simple one is that if it was foggy, you couldn't see the towers around you, so you couldn't relay the message. But in general, this was just a huge breakthrough. Not as fast as telegrams, but still a really smart mechanical solution before electrical solutions existed.

SPEAKER_01 28:12 And other than these French semaphores, there have been many examples of relay systems and beacon networks through history. So the Greeks used like um relay beacons to announce the fall of Troy, which is, you know, the story immortalized by Homer. Um each beacon was lit in succession, sending the message hundreds of miles in hours rather than weeks. So by relaying messages village to village, news could travel over a hundred kilometers in just a few hours.

SPEAKER_00 28:42 And medieval England used exactly the same idea. Hilltop beacons were set up across the country, ready to be lit if an invasion was spotted along the coast.

SPEAKER_01 28:53 And they did use them, such as in 1588 when the Spanish Armada was sighted approaching England. Beacon fires were lit along the southern coast, one after another. Uh the flames appeared on hilltops, they spread the warning inland and across the country, allowing the English fleet to uh be prepared and engage the Spanish in the English Channel, uh, which is a battle the English won. But let's move on to the time of letters.

SPEAKER_00 29:21 Yes, let's get on to letters. So before all of this technology, you wrote things down and sent them on their way.

SPEAKER_01 29:29 Yeah. And actually, even with letters, that must have been such a nightmare trying to meet up with someone. So, you know, first of all, you had to agree on a time, a date, a location. Then you just had to turn up and hope they actually showed, you know, hope nothing happened in the meantime, that they didn't get ill or forget or double book or well, pretty much anything, because there was no way of checking. It was just all based on goodwill. I just wonder how anyone got anything done.

SPEAKER_00 29:54 Yeah, it's true. And also, how did you know that they received the letter in the first place? You just had to assume it's possible that you didn't even want the meeting anymore by the time the letter had arrived. They were usually carried by horseback, ships, or trains, all subject to delays due to weather, road conditions, or mechanical failures. Depending on the distance, letters could take days, weeks, or even months to reach their destination. We didn't have planes, we didn't have lorries, we didn't have, you know, um powered boats with engines.

SPEAKER_01 30:32 Yeah, and before established postal systems and those fast modes of transport, in ancient times, messages sometimes travelled slower than the people sending them. So if a merchant traveled from China to Rome, for instance, along the Silk Road, the journey could take two years, but any message sent home could take just as long, which meant, you know, there would have been instances where people would sometimes return home before the letters that they sent arrived. So and even if they weren't being walked by foot, letters were still slow, like really slow. There was no super fast ships and, like you mentioned, no aeroplanes. So if you lived in Britain in the 1700s and wanted to write to someone in America, your letter had to travel by ship across the Atlantic, and that journey could take six to eight weeks, sometimes longer, and obviously there is the very real risk of the ship never arriving as well.

SPEAKER_00 31:25 I don't want to say that I completely understand this, but a while ago when I was in Guernsey, I sent a letter to my girlfriend in Poland. It was intended to get there for her birthday, and a month and a half later I flew and went to see her, and the letter arrived after I did, so I can feel this pain. Uh, but anyway, what this meant was that every message that you wrote had to be very carefully considered. You couldn't send a quick follow-up message or clarify something you forgot to include. You had one shot. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 32:04 So when people wrote letters, they often wrote them like mini essays because they wanted to get everything they possibly could written down, knowing that the next reply might not arrive for months. In fact, historians studying migration in the 1800s found that many families who moved overseas simply lost contact with relatives completely, and we'll actually be tackling migration in an upcoming episode. So keep your ears peeled for that.

SPEAKER_00 32:29 Yeah. Um, if you moved away, that was it. Like now you can keep in contact from a distance really well, but moving away meant something quite different back then. And you know, with letters, what if you receive one and the the handwriting's too hard to read? I I have this problem as uh as a developer first and a handwriter second. Um what if the message is just written badly or too hard to understand? It would just it would be devastating.

SPEAKER_01 33:00 Yeah, the handwriting thing's so funny, isn't it? Because I actually do think in the modern day, people are writing a lot less. They don't need to practice their handwriting. So when they do finally come to handwriting, either, you know, one, it's not as neat as perhaps it used to be in the past. Um, and also your hand starts hurting after writing just a little passage. At least I don't know if you found that. Yes. Um I wonder if we ever had some sort of big shock where all the technology, you know, sort of post-apocalyptic type world where the technology suddenly vanished, whether we would have to relearn the art of handwriting and the art of writing letters and things like that. I I wonder if that will come back uh and be important again, perhaps. But without you know, centralized or efficient systems, uh letters also often got lost, especially in regions with sort of rudimentary postal services. And in war-torn areas or regions with political instability, letters could also be intercepted or stolen. Um, so you've got to wonder at that point, have I been ghosted or did my message just never make it?

SPEAKER_00 34:06 Yeah. Uh there's so much uh chance for people to get offended wrongly here. Yeah, it's bad enough if you just forget to text someone back. But people would often also write letters assuming that the recipient might already be dead. Because travel and disease were so dangerous, letters often contain lines like, if you're still alive when this reaches you, uh, which I might start including. You haven't texted someone in a few days. Yeah, if you're still alive when this reaches you, it would become very passive aggressive nowadays, wouldn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, this was uh in in very serious terms, very prevalent when it comes to news of war. Um, families sometimes learnt about deaths in war like months after the event.

SPEAKER_01 35:05 Yeah, and and there was the case of the message that arrived after the war had already ended. So so this was the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. So it was actually for two weeks after the war had officially ended. So a peace treaty between Britain and the United States had already been signed in Europe, but the news had to cross the Atlantic by ship. So by the time the letter arrived, thousands of soldiers had already fought and died. So it just it's amazing that the news travelled slower than armies could could advance.

SPEAKER_00 35:36 Yeah, it's it must have been quite brutal because you see these. If you've ever gone to like a museum for during the war, and you've seen that some people have collections of like love letters between a soldier and you know their partner back home, it may be that you know the letter a letter from them may arrive at the same time, or like you know, you may have received a letter that's like declaring their love, they may already be dead when that's happened. That's the brutal reality of this. And if on a sort of lighter note, if you're worried about Tinder ruining relationships, sometimes people actually used to get married through letters. Wow. Um, now we think of long distance as something that's only been really possible to do properly, I guess, now with the technology that we have, but long distance couples aren't really a new phenomena. They maintained their relationships entirely through letters for years. Some even married without meeting in person first. Does that sound familiar? Well, now we're just marrying Chat GPT. Yeah, yes. And um how far we've come. I know it's uh a sad time. But you know how we were saying that the cost of a text message would often keep us from sending too many in the last episode.

SPEAKER_01 36:59 Yeah, it was like a natural barrier to it kept messages short, and we didn't want to send we always sent actually useful messages or at least what we thought was useful because we didn't want to waste our 20p.

SPEAKER_00 37:10 Yeah, um, and you can obviously see this with letters to a different sort of scale. So letters now cost you money, but back then they cost the receiver money. In Britain, before postal reform in 1840, the recipient paid for the letter, not the sender. And people sometimes refuse letters that they couldn't afford.

SPEAKER_01 37:37 Yeah, I'd be refusing every single one. There's no way I'm paying to read somebody else's letter to me.

SPEAKER_00 37:42 I'd I'd refuse bills and things. Yeah, can't afford that one. Yeah, I suppose as well, like how how brutal would it be to uh send a a love letter to somebody and they refused it because they don't want to spend the money to read it. Oh um, something else of note, um, people used to actually invent secret codes in letters, and because letters passed through many hands, people frequently used codes or invisible ink. Some spies used lemon juice to write secret messages that, you know, like invisible messages on the on the page.

SPEAKER_01 38:24 Yeah, before the secure digital communication that we have today, letters could be read by postal workers, couriers, government censors, servants, family members, everyone, co-workers. And um, it was quite easy to do as well. So people often had to use codes or ciphers or or this invisible ink, like you say.

SPEAKER_00 38:43 Yeah, and this stuff is so much cooler than modern encryption, right? It's it's not as secure, but there's something that catches the imagination with these solutions, at least for me. It's like, you know, discovering invisible ink with a secret message written and cracking codes in movies. It's just so much cooler.

SPEAKER_01 39:04 Yes, and the history of Cypress actually is so fascinating. We're going to be touching on it in a big episode coming up very soon.

SPEAKER_00 39:11 So actually, in many ancient societies, the fastest communication method was simply a human runner. Now there's this famous story of the marathon, and that comes from this idea. According to legend, a Greek messenger ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to deliver news of victory.

SPEAKER_01 39:35 Yes, after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, a Greek messenger named Phidipides ran roughly 40 kilometers to Athens. His mission was to deliver a single message, we have won. He then supposedly collapsed and died immediately after delivering it, and which is its origin story of the modern marathon race.

SPEAKER_00 39:57 But yeah, professional messenger systems were common in many cultures. So the Inca Empire in South America used runners called chaskis. They ran along mountain roads carrying messages across thousands of kilometers of rugged terrain, and they did it all without horses. Many Native American tribes also used runners to deliver messages. They relied on their memory and obviously their physical endurance to cover these vast distances and deliver the message. And in some cases, this message was conveyed by relay runners to speed up delivery.

SPEAKER_01 40:37 Yeah, relay being a bit of a common theme in ancient communication, but you know, many stories, warnings, and directives were passed on through these messengers who were often trained specifically to retain and accurately repeat information over long distances. So some may have carried objects or symbols to add meaning, things like knots in a cord, for instance, similar to the Inca kipu, and a particular feather or branch, maybe, or a carved token that conveyed a specific meaning. And messages, they might even act out parts of a message, um, I guess like charades, uh, especially in societies with rich oral traditions or limited shared language. Um, because you can imagine taking a message to another tribe or village or whatever where they don't speak the same language as you speak. Um, but as you as you might guess, just as with the letters and the telegraphs, this was fraught with challenges. So um, well, even more challenges to be honest. Without written aids, messengers relied entirely on memory, and memory could falter over long journeys, or if the message was particularly complex. I mean, even if I'm just mildly tired, I find it hard to remember even the most basic of things. So it must have been really challenging for them if they ended up exhausting themselves on these long journeys. Yeah. And even slight deviations in how a message was delivered could could alter its meaning completely, and that would lead to misunderstandings. So messengers you might consciously or unconsciously change the message to suit their own perspective, um, you know, or to favor one party. I think it's really easy for anybody to do that, even if you don't know you're doing it. And when messages crossed linguistic or cultural boundaries, that again, misunderstandings were incredibly likely.

SPEAKER_00 42:26 Yes, definitely. There's this there's this phrase, isn't there? Uh don't shoot the messenger. And sometimes maybe the messenger was the one that deserved being shot. Because um the one of the most famous military disasters, for example, in British history was caused by a misunderstood message. During the charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, an order from uh Lord Raglan was delivered poorly. The cavalry commander Lord Cardigan misunderstood the instructions and led his troops directly into heavy Russian artillery. And the result of this was catastrophic. Around 110 soldiers were killed and many more were wounded. The event became immortalized in Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.

SPEAKER_01 43:20 But there was a time when pigeons used to deliver messages, of course. Yeah, and how did they ever train them to do that? I I wondered the same thing. I and I mentioned it to my wife and she said, But how did they train pigeons? So it's simpler than it seems, but it's still really clever. I mean, rather than being trained to fly to a specific location or any number of specific locations, pigeons were instead trained to return to their home location. And actually, it wasn't that much training involved anyway, because they have a really strong instinct to fly home.

SPEAKER_00 43:56 Right. So they they took the pigeon somewhere else first and then just let it fly home.

SPEAKER_01 44:02 Yeah, exactly. So the pigeon would be shipped in a cage, for instance, to wherever you needed them. And then when the time came for a letter to be delivered, you'd attach the letter to their legs and off they'd fly home. And it's amazing, really, because they could travel hundreds of miles and find their way home still. Um in fact, they can go up to 800 kilometers or 500 miles in a day and reach speeds of over 90 kilometers per hour.

SPEAKER_00 44:28 Jeez, and these pigeons were so reliable that they were used for sort of like over 3,000 years in history. So evidence of their use dates back to ancient Egypt, and they were actually still being used during World War II. Yeah, but by World War II we had much more technological methods, right? Yes, that's true. But radio signals could be jammed or intercepted, so pigeons had their place. There was a war pigeon called GI J. And uh this pigeon literally received a um military medal for its services. Wow, that must have been a good effort by G.I. Joe. Yeah. Well, yeah, he made a 20-mile flight in just 20 minutes from a British army base, and he delivered a message just in time to stop an air attack and saved the lives of at least a hundred Allied soldiers. Wow. The area had been liberated early, so the planes would have been bombing their own soldiers.

SPEAKER_01 45:34 Wow. So G.I. Joe really earned that medal. Um, but wasn't the only war pigeon that won a medal for its services. Oh yeah? Yeah, so legend has it that in World War One, a pigeon named Cher Ami saved the lives of 194 soldiers. So it said that despite coming under fire, being blinded in one eye and having its legs shot off, it delivered a message that saved the lost battalion of American soldiers in 1918. And the Smithsonian actually even has a taxidermy ShareMe in its collection. Though they do admit definitive evidence of this event is inconclusive. But that's not all. Pigeons were responsible for the burgeoning success of the British news agency Reuters as well. So in 1850, Baron Julius Reuter used carrier pigeons to deliver stock market prices between Brussels and Arkansas. And this was before telegraph cables connected cities. So this method made them faster than the competitors. And it actually this sort of really only lasted until 1851 when the telegraph gap was closed and pigeons were no longer faster, but still really cool.

SPEAKER_00 46:44 It's interesting to compare now that we used to deliver these prices by pidgin. And um now the the the speed at which people can react to price changes in the stock market is so fast. Um, and people are like moving, were moving their offices closer to exchanges to try and get the edge on competitors by like milliseconds that some exchanges now have to add artificial like miles of um cable to slow down signals. Oh wow, just so that everyone has a fair kind of delay in getting the price, but like everyone gets a 200 millisecond delay, basically.

SPEAKER_01 47:25 And now we're thinking with quantum computers we can make that speed even smaller in the future.

SPEAKER_00 47:31 Yeah, it's mad, but we used to function just fine with pigeons. And now we just like bat them away in like public settings and we think they're a pest. But as we said, um other civilizations used pigeons as far back as ancient Egypt. And it seems civilizations all came to this realization about the use of pigeons independently. People just noticed that they had this strong instinct to fly home. Now it's interesting that these days we just notice that they're annoying and they're all over our cities, but people really, you know, had a lot more respect for pigeons back then. In somewhere like Egypt, travelling the Nile would take far too long to send sort of military messages or royal news, so pigeons were invaluable. And in the Archaemenid Persian Empire, which was between 550 and 330 BC, this it's thought that they developed one of the earliest large-scale pigeon relay systems, um, which is amazing. More relay systems, but you know, employing you know, many pigeons to do it. Against their will, yeah. But employing nonetheless.

SPEAKER_02 48:46 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:47 But you know, one of the popular options otherwise was to use um horse couriers, and they could take days or weeks to deliver messages that pigeons could deliver within hours.

SPEAKER_01 49:00 Yeah, and it's not until the Middle Ages that we began to see uh the the first true pidgin postal service. So around the 12th century, rulers of the Islamic Empire built extensive pigeon communication networks, and the networks stretched across Syria, Egypt, and parts of the Middle East as well. Pigeons have been amazing throughout history.

SPEAKER_00 49:19 Yeah, so we we need to give them a bit more respect, actually. I uh I remember watching with you uh documentary about Mike Tyson, if you remember, and he loved loves pigeons, and he was you know, he was giving them so much respect and getting basically getting some uh stick for it when he was a kid. I kind of get it now. Pigeons are underrated. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, more love to the pigeons. Yeah. So let's step back even further uh than this, which bearing in mind this is you know BC, we're talking about dates now. So before humans had a way to physically transport messages, we had other ingenious methods.

SPEAKER_01 50:04 Yeah, I guess because you can only transport a message if you've come up with, well, one, of written language, and also something that you can write like write things down on like paper or papyrus or something.

SPEAKER_00 50:15 Exactly. And you know, you'd need some degree of literacy to do that, to read it as well, and uh a shared language between where you're sending and receiving. So before all of that, humans did things like send smoke signals.

SPEAKER_01 50:30 Yeah, I can imagine a smoke signal sort of setup. Pretty straightforward. You burn a fire, get it smoky, and a tribe from far away can see it. But beyond that, I don't see how it could convey like a really in-depth message, though.

SPEAKER_00 50:44 Well, actually, kind of in a way, a bit like um semaphores or telegrams, you could actually send various types of messages by controlling bursts of smoke. Some tribes even developed full codes. And certain Native American groups developed a whole codified signal system, almost like early Morse code. As long as you had a pre-agreed meaning of the bursts, of course, people could signal things like danger, arrival, victory, or they could request help. You know, SOS is a very important message. It's one of the I think it's the only one I know in Morse code.

SPEAKER_01 51:26 Yeah, a very smoky SOS message. Um and and given that smoke signals can be seen 10, maybe 20 kilometers away, depending on the terrain, it must have been actually pretty useful.

SPEAKER_00 51:37 Yeah, especially because you could sort of relay again the smoke signal, kind of like the medieval beacon networks that we mentioned earlier. And basically every type of communication relies on some form of relay once you get to a certain distance. A chain of watches in this case could be on hilltops or mountains and spot smoke signals and then light their own and pass the signal further down the chain.

SPEAKER_01 52:05 Yeah, what if they got the burst slightly wrong though with smoke? Because you know, it's one thing to have written language, it's harder to manipulate nature like a smoke signal must be hard to control perfectly. I guess it ends up like you mentioned before, like a smoky game of Chinese whispers, you know, oh they're they're asking how we are, how lovely, and then like hordes of like attackers spend upon them.

SPEAKER_00 52:31 Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I guess there's no backspace with smoke, is there? Like you you're like trying to say like danger, danger, and you've done it wrong, and it's like, oh no, no, no, undo, undo. Okay, you've just sent you just send the welcome message. Just put the fire out, like we're making it worse. Should never have had the intern do it.

SPEAKER_01 52:51 Yeah. But um, there is another really interesting ancient form of communication that's worth talking about, and this is talking drums. So these could actually transmit um complex language just by using rhythm and pitch. How could you do that? So talking drums worked because many West African languages are tonal languages. Uh so that's when the pitch of a word changes its meaning. So, for example, a single syllable might mean different things depending on whether the tone goes high, low, rising, or falling.

SPEAKER_00 53:23 Uh yeah, like um, I think Thai and Chinese might be a bit like this as well.

SPEAKER_01 53:28 Yeah, I think Vietnamese as well. Um, but yeah, there's a there's still tonal languages, of course, that exist today. So it meant that pitch patterns could be reproduced with a musical instrument. Uh so a drum could literally mimic the melody of speech. So the drum itself would be specially designed. Um, and one of the most famous ones is the hourglass-shaped drum. And that has two drum heads with cords connecting the skins and a hollow wooden body. And the drummer holds the drum under the arm, and then when the chords are squeezed, the tension changes and the pitch rises or falls.

SPEAKER_00 54:02 Oh, okay. So, yeah, the drummer can kind of imitate the intonation of speech.

SPEAKER_01 54:07 Yeah, and this drum used for for this sort of scenario was often called the dun-dun in Yoruba culture.

SPEAKER_00 54:15 It also seems like this could be rife for misinterpretation given that drums can't really reproduce like consonants or vowels or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 54:25 Yeah, so they actually had uh a way of dealing with this. So what they did instead was they used longer descriptive uh phrases to avoid confusion. So uh maybe they wanted to say king, but instead of drumming king, they might instead play something like the great chief who rules the people. Um so that like a longer phrase kind of acted to give some context clues to what they're trying to say. And anthropologists sometimes call this drum speech. And again, this type of message had its distance limits, of course. So this could only travel around five to ten kilometers, but it could be relayed as well. And early European explorers arriving in parts of West Africa in the 1800s were shocked by this because villagers seemed to know that they were coming before they arrived.

SPEAKER_00 55:14 That's amazing. The news was spreading through the drum networks.

SPEAKER_01 55:18 Yeah, and and as they do, European colonial governments sometimes banned talking drums. You know, they realized that drum communication allowed people to organise and share information outside of colonial control. And in some regions, drums were even destroyed.

SPEAKER_00 55:34 Yeah, um, and I suppose, you know, as an outsider, you don't understand what these drums mean. You just hear drums. You don't know, like, oh, they're communicating or what they're even saying. So of course they're gonna be threatened by that power that that that the uh indigenous kind of communities would have. As we're on percussion and acoustic signalling, let's also kind of mention echo communication. So some mountain communities used echo calls across valleys to communicate.

SPEAKER_01 56:06 Oh, yeah. I I kind of just um I'm imagining doing that at the top of a mountain. I could see how that would be partially useful.

SPEAKER_00 56:13 Yes, well, definitely. And um it relies heavily on the kind of acoustics of the landscape. It wasn't a universal system, but in some places it really was useful. One example of this is Jodeling.

SPEAKER_01 56:29 Uh yes, so that was done in the Alps mostly, wasn't it, Yodeling?

SPEAKER_00 56:33 Yes. Uh mountain farmers in Switzerland and Austria would use these calls to communicate across valleys, and these calls could be used to cool livestock from long distances or communicate between farms or even summon help, you know, these sort of sorts of things. And it works well because it rapidly switches between chest voice and head voice. Uh, you get this low, deep to high very quickly, and it creates this high contrast tone that will carry through the mountain air. In the quiet alpine environments, these calls could actually travel up to five to eight kilometers.

SPEAKER_01 57:14 And there's a similar thing called kolning calls used by Scandinavian herders. So this is a high-pitched singing technique used by women herding cattle in Swedish forests, and the sound is so piercing that it can travel over ten kilometers in the right conditions.

SPEAKER_00 57:30 Echo calls were used in other places too, basically using cliffs or valleys as natural megaphones. But it worked much better in the ancient world because the environments were much quieter. Now, just the noise of the modern world would cancel much of it out in most places. We like the guttural screams of deaf metal vocals. I wonder if they'd be useful for echo calls.

SPEAKER_01 57:59 Yeah, imagine hearing that over the mountains. Just this visceral scream. I think it'd be quite frightening to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 58:06 Yes. Well, um, one last thing to mention on this, which probably links us to our next topic a little bit, are these um these Aztec death whistles. Have you heard them before? No. Oh, I highly recommend checking those out. It's a whistle that the Aztecs would use as an instrument of war, but also for communication. And the way that they channeled the air through it sounds like this piercing, like terrifying scream. So you can imagine, you can imagine, and and and they're very loud, so you can imagine from a distance, just you know, the Aztecs were very frightening to other armies, and uh this was part of the reason, right? Like this communication method was scary.

SPEAKER_01 58:56 Well, next time we're waging war, Matt, we we'll go in screaming the vocals of the latest song that we've been listening to. Sounds like a plan. Um and actually, so like you mentioned, this does lead us really well onto shell horns. So if we cast our minds back to our episode on music with Steve Prittie, which is a great episode, go check it out. But Steve mentioned how some of the first ever musical instruments were shell horns.

SPEAKER_00 59:23 Yeah, and he said um that ancient humans figured out that you'd need to saw off a bit of the horn before it could be used as an instrument, right?

SPEAKER_01 59:33 That's right. And in our discussion, we explain how music wasn't just for entertainment back then. Um, it was also a useful tool for civilizations, and this is a really good example of that. So large conch shells could be used as horns and heard several kilometers away.

SPEAKER_00 59:48 Yeah, I'm imagining ancient people making the fanfare type of noise you'd usually hear on a trumpet. Yeah, like I was gonna do exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00 I I don't know uh if they would have used that exact tone or tune. Um I wonder if they had their own tune. But I yeah, I guess it would have sounded remarkably similar because if you've heard a conch being played versus a trumpet, they they are really crazily alike. Um but still its abilities would have been quite limited, right? So, you know, you can't communicate a lot of meaning with a horn blast, maybe a few different blast lengths, maybe a different tune. You could signal, what, three or four messages maybe at a push. And these shell horns, they were widely used in ancient Mesoamerican civilizations like the Maya and the Aztecs. And this practice um actually could date back as as far back as the late ice age. Uh, one famous example is a conch shell discovered in a cave in the Pyrenees in France that dates to around 18,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50 So if we ponder on all of these forms of communication, from shouting in the mountains to sending smoke signals, letters that could take months to arrive. For most of human history, distance meant something very real.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:09 Yeah, we've kind of trivialized distance in a way, haven't we? We even have bloggers uploading YouTube videos of their escapades in remote islands. Um, but it wasn't that long ago when many places felt or were much more remote, like legitimately remote.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25 Yeah, if you if you traveled far from home in ancient times, or even just 150 years ago, you might not hear your family's voices again for years or even ever. Imagine that feeling. Today, if someone you love moves across the world, it it's difficult, but you can call them instantly, you can see them, you can speak to them in real time. But in the past, the silence between messages could stretch for months.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:58 Yeah, I guess you just didn't know what was happening beyond beyond your immediate world so much. I wonder if that was partly nice. I mean, people would have travelled a lot less, right? But maybe it was quite good not to worry about so much going on outside outside the sphere of where you were living. Or maybe it was heartbreaking, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:18 I think the world was legitimately smaller, and the idea of even just moving to a another town in the same country seemed like, okay, we we might never see each other again or speak to each other again. But yeah, you're right. I think people's worlds were generally just smaller and more uh intimate. I think some in some ways that we've actually lost something by widening our world because we have to think about this wider world um a lot more now.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:49 Well, yeah, and I think there is part of us that still yearns for all of these things that we once had. People still write to pen pals, they send letters to pen pals in different countries, they still send postcards, even though really there's no there's no logical reason to send a postcard anymore. So there's something about all of these things that can yeah, that I think that we long for in some ways. And and hopefully this all episode also makes people appreciate just how ingenious our methods of communication have been and how lucky we we are today.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23 Definitely. Um in some ways, people like the idea of going back, and I totally get that, and sometimes I feel the same. But you know, as somebody, we both live away from our homes now, and it would make it more difficult, I think, if you couldn't just call up your mum back home, or you send them a message and you don't even know if they've received it, uh, you know that it's been a month or two, they probably should have got it by now. Maybe you have to wait another month or two to get their response. It must have been a lot harder. And yeah, you could argue we probably wouldn't be away from home uh because traveling was a bit harder, but the fact that we are able to live these lives now and not be like completely lonely and distanced from our families, we do have to appreciate that a bit.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:17 Yes, absolutely. And hopefully this episode has helped you reflect. Do let us know all your thoughts in the comments and also subscribe. This is what we did before. I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:26 And I'm Matt, and thank you very much for listening. We will speak to you again soon.