TELEGRAPH (derived from TELE and GRAPH), is the name very properly given to an instrument, by means of which information may be almost instantaneously conveyed to a considerable distance.
The telegraph, though it has been generally known and used by the moderns only for a few years, is by no means a modern invention. There is reason to believe that amongst
the Greeks there was some sort of telegraph in use. The burning of Troy was certainly known in Greece very soon after it happened, and before any person had returned from thence. Now that was altogether so tedious a piece of business, that conjecture never could have supplied the place of information. A Greek play begins with a scene, in which a watchman descends from the top of a tower in Greece, and gives the information that Troy was taken. "I have been looking out these ten years (says he) to see when that would happen, and this night it is done." Of the antiquity of a mode of conveying intelligence quickly to a great distance, this is certainly a proof.
The Chinese, when they send couriers on the great canal, or when any great man travels there, make signals by fire from one day's journey to another, to have every thing prepared; and most of the barbarous nations used formerly to give the alarm of war by fires lighted on the hills or rising grounds.
Polybius calls the different instruments used by the ancients for communicating information pyra, because the signals were always made by means of fire. At first they communicated information of events merely by torches; but this method was of little use, because it was necessary beforehand to fix the meaning of every particular signal. Now as events are exceedingly various, it was impossible to express the greater number of them by any premeditated contrivance. It was easy, for instance, to express by signals that a fleet had arrived at such a place, because this had been foreseen, and signals accordingly had been agreed upon to denote it; but an unexpected revolt, a murder, and such accidents, as happen but too often, and require an immediate remedy, could not be communicated by such signals; because to foresee them was impossible.