Communication Has Taken Flight Since The Days of Carrier Pigeons

Communication Has Taken Flight Since The Days of Carrier Pigeons

This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette. Our history can be painted with some broad strokes. We had the Ice Age, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Today, we are living in the age of communication. We are connected through cellphones, radio, TV, podcasts and the internet. We talk, we tweet, we link, we text, we email, we Facebook and we badger AI with our questions. Information flashes around the world at the speed of light. We have certainly come a long way since the use of carrier pigeons in ancient times and since Pheidippides in 490 BC had to run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce a military victory over the Persians. The first scientific method of long-range communication was invented in 1792 in France by Claude Chappe, whose “semaphore system” consisted of a series of towers, each within line of sight of othe