The optical telegraph

The very serious dictionary of the municipalities of the Jura, written by A. Rousset (1854), states that the summit of the Fyète forest, reaching 898 meters in altitude, was equipped in 1831 with a semaphore telegraph for the purposes of drawing-up military maps. This semaphore system appears to have been a Chappe system, named after the famous inventor of the optical telegraph, an ancestor to the electric telegraph system, and which was already able to send messages at close to 700 kilometres an hour, but only during good weather!